As far as I’m concerned, this can’t happen fast enough.

The New York Times:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, people briefed by Obama transition officials said Monday.

…Obama transition officials have consulted with a variety of authorities on legal and human rights and with military experts. Several of those experts said the officials had expressed great interest in alternatives to the military commission system, like trying detainees in federal courts, and appeared to have grown hostile to proposals like an indefinite detention law.

Politico.com:

Feingold said he thinks Obama is likely to issue executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies, and others have indicated that those will likely cover the interrogation and detention of terror suspects, and keeping the records of past president’s secrets.

The Associated Press reported Monday that transition advisers said Obama could sign an executive order in his first week ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, although shuttering the prison and transferring the prisoners somewhere else would take time.

As something of a Bible student, I find it confounding that the GOP – that party of Pharisees so concerned with invoking God amid their rhetoric, even if done so irreverently, so vocal about preserving marriage sanctity, so bold in their assertions that we should mold our national laws around God’s laws – has the temerity and shamelessness to actually defend torture.

When did Christ order his apostles to waterboard those who plotted against His life in the name of security? When did Paul torture Roman guards or Jewish zealots to learn of the next attempt on his life? Not a single New Testament writer advocates a get them before they get us mindset.

Oh, wait. I take that back. Paul did … before he was converted.

Hypocritical posturing on topics like this should send signals that the Republican Party is in no way the godlier choice. They say the right things on a couple of emotionally charged issues, but that is the extent of it. They hold others to standards they themselves are unwilling to meet. They show more concern for ideology and fiscal philosophies than they do for the people their policies impact. The party of Lincoln has fallen a long way with no sign of recovery.

I am not blinded to Obama’s flaws, but I do have hope that his presidency will be more concerned about serving his citizenry more than his agenda, that human lives will mean more to him than blanket statistics and veiled threats, that his government will be more concerned about the weightier matters – mercy, justice, and faithfulness to those whose lives depend on him. Closing Guantanamo is a start.

Perhaps I’ll end up disappointed in four years, but I doubt he could disappoint me any more than the last president I helped vote into office.

Tags: politics, opinion

“Okay, these are the kids on the bubble, so we need to focus remediating them the most before spring testing.”

“If we can get 10 more kids in this pull-out group to pass, we’ll meet AYP.”

“We have to prioritize which kids we think we can get to proficiency and those we can’t.”

When NCLB was passed, we were told that we wouldn’t have to teach to the test. We were told it would not take priority over standard instruction. After seven years, not only are we teaching to the test, but we are gaming our instruction to increase our odds of meeting AYP expectations.

I sincerely hope our president-elect takes a long, hard look at the adverse effects this bipartisan piece of legislation has wrought.

Tags: education, opinion

The Presidential Campaign of Al Gore 1.0

In 2000, the Democratic Party was all but assured another term in the White House. Al Gore swept the Democratic primaries and caucuses. Though widely criticized for his dishonesty regarding an affair with Monica Lewinsky, departing President Bill Clinton was leaving with an approval rating of 68% – a higher departing percentage than any president since polling was established seventy years earlier (unless you count presidents who died in office i.e. FDR and JFK). Al Gore's running mate would be the then-popular Joseph Lieberman, a man who could reach across party lines and attract conservative and value-based voters who might otherwise have shied form voting for Gore.


Al Gore image by Breuwi. Geroge W. Bush image by Shawn Clark

On the Republican side, numerous potential candidates were jockeying for power. There was Steve Forbes, John McCain, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, and Pat Buchanan among others. Thrown into the mix was Texas governor George W. Bush, son of a former president. The primaries ensued with Bush trailing McCain by 19% at one point, but Bush pulled out ahead to take the nomination. He was considered by many to be intellectually inferior to Gore, and McCain's campaign accused him of mudslinging his way to victory.

In one of the most controversial elections in this nation's history, Bush narrowly defeated Gore by five electoral votes. He lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 and 0.5%. The outcome ultimately came down to a Supreme Court decision ruling Florida's recounting of votes as unconstitutional. Suspicion also fell upon Florida's governor – George W. Bush's younger brother.

Regardless of the political nuances regarding counting the votes, the election was a huge upset because Gore was such a certain candidate. He wasn't expected to defeat Bush. He was expected to overwhelm Bush, but he didn't.

Al Gore and the Liberal Media

How could Gore have lost this election? One of my family members has suggested that the nation seeks refuge in conservatism after being subjected to liberal politics for too long. I tend to disagree based on the numbers. Again, Bush did win the electoral vote, but he lost the popular vote. The general population did not exactly flock to the Republicans after Clinton, and remember that Clinton – despite scandal – remained a popular president throughout his two terms. Certainly, Al Gore did himself few favors by keeping his emotions so close in check and playing to the middle, a strategy that Ariana Huffington thinks hurt his chances.

In October 2007, Evgenia Peretz published an article in Vanity Fair called Going After Gore. It was the first truly in-depth interview with Mr. Gore since his 2000 defeat, and the author takes a very critical look at the role of the media in that election. The article opens with this blurb:

Al Gore couldn't believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes ("I invented the Internet"), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush.

Several eye-opening quotes fill the piece, paining a picture of a media that turns against the candidate it's assumed to be biased for. These are just some samples. Ms. Peretz goes much deeper in her article and examines the election coverage (or mis-coverage) in great detail.

Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."

"Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. "Someone draws a caricature, and it's funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, 'Aw shucks, that's too simple.' In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom." He notes, "I do not except myself from this criticism."

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."

As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post … "They just wanted to tear Gore apart," says a major network correspondent on the trail.

The article paints a picture of a media that created a far more favorable characterization of Bush than it did of Gore, a media that glossed over Bush's misstatements while overanalyzing Gore. The author describes the media's treatment of Mr. Gore as toxic, and the Democratic candidate had to spend as much time fighting fraudulent information from news outlets as he did attacks from his opponent.

While Gore's presentation of himself was far from the dynamic and engaging speaker and activist he is today, his campaign was severely damaged by a media that was all to willing to deal in caricatures and silliness rather than focus on issues and objective reporting.

How 2008 Could Be 2000 Version 2.0

image by the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Again, we have a clear contrast between the Republican and Democratic candidates. In fact, basically the same intellectual and personality contrasts can be drawn between Obama and McCain as could be between Gore and Bush. Again, the Democratic nominee seems to be a sure win. One advantage Obama has over Gore is a somewhat undefinable presence that demands rapt attention, but, like Gore, Obama has been moving to a more centrist platform as his campaign evolves. Likewise, McCain's positions on several issues have been drifting to the right.

How is the media faring? Recently, McCain and conservative pundits have been complaining that Obama has received more than twice as much airtime after the primaries. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, that coverage has not been kind.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Writing for the New York Times, Frank Rich reinforces the idea that Obama is succeeding despite the media rather than because of it:

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Again, the media has begun to deal in characters rather than people, and they are tailoring their coverage of the candidates and events to fit those roles they have cast – McCain the grandfatherly war hero and Obama the socialist (potentially) Muslim elitist.

Think of the sheer number of media blitzes that have surrounded Obama's campaign: the Jeremiah Wright soundbite, "guns and religion," flag pins, "terrorist fist-jabs," madrasah, etc. Every move this man makes, every word he utters, every association he has comes under the most sensational scrutiny. In contrast, McCain receives free pass after free pass from the media.

Here are some examples from Media Matters. Please note, all of these examples focus on only one network, and it's not Fox.

• Media outlets reported McCain's criticism of Obama's "political speech" in Germany, didn't note McCain's own recent speech in Canada
  
  
• CBS News omitted a second McCain falsehood: his characterization of Iraq war as "the first major conflict since 9/11"
  
  
• Despite warning that any "gaffe" by Obama on his trip could be disastrous, nets' evening news broadcasts ignored McCain misstatements in same period
  
  
• Couric did not challenge McCain's suggestion that "five Nobel laureates and 300 economists" agree he can balance the budget
  
  
• CBS' Schieffer left out part of Obama speech that undermined Schieffer's suggestion of a "different take" on Iraq policy
  
  
• Numerous media outlets reported McCain's attack on Obama over public financing without noting McCain's loan
  
  
• Today, Early Show covered Wright interview, but didn't ask McCain about Hagee
  
  
• CBS report on candidates' tendency to "exaggerate ... his or her record" ignored several McCain distortions of his record

This is just a sampling and doesn't cover numerous flip-flops by McCain that the media has largely ignored as well as various offensive jokes he has made or claims to not know how he voted on some issues. On Crooks and Liars, Jon Amato, commenting the media glossing over one of McCain's misstatements once rhetorically asked, "What if Obama had said this?"

"What if?" indeed.

Avoiding a Repeat of History

While I think my political leanings are somewhat evident, I'm not writing this to tell you for whom to vote. I am, however, writing this to tell you how to vote – not as a Republican or as a Democrat, but as an informed individual.

Vote informed, not educated by the mainstream media which doesn't inform so much as it entertains through information. Do your own research on the candidates. Fact-check everything. Read the candidates positions from their own websites (Obama, McCain). Read independent commentary. Go look at their voting records yourself (Obama, McCain). Go to a rally and ask them your questions in person, but don't trust what you see on TV or hear on the radio at face value.

And never, ever use the term liberal media again. Two main contributors hurt the Al Gore campaign of 2000: a political move to the center and a media that was more interested in drama and caricatures than facts. WIth both candidates in this election, political drifting is potentially damaging to their campaigns, but you can eliminate the other variable. Don't vote for some two-dimension cardboard cutout as portrayed by the mainstream media. Look beyond the hype. Don't become acquainted with characters on TV. Acquaint yourselves with the people, and make a decision based on information rather than infotainment.

Update: Media Matters Action Network is creating on online pledge regarding monitoring media bias – especially in regards to Republican candidates and talking points. Check it out if this interests you.

Tags: politics, opinion, media

On Wednesday, conservative radio host Michael Savage had this to say about autism:

…A fraud, a racket. You know what autism is? I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is.

I have to admit that I didn't write about this the moment I read about it. I had to cool down first. Mr. Savage should be congratulated. He's now one of only four figures in the media who have managed to get under my skin. (In case you are wondering, the other three are Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh.)

Let's start with the assertion that 99% of autism cases are fraudulent. This figure is based on what, exactly? Does Mr. Savage have any scientific studies or educational experience to back this up? Has he personally conducted observation and surveys of autism-diagnosed children to verify the veracity of said diagnosis? No, he does what too many other talking-heads do. He makes up a statistic on the spot – a lie that his loyal listeners will begin repeating as fact.

He supports his hypothesis by citing minority asthma diagnoses.

For a long while, we were hearing that every minority child had asthma. Why did they sudden -- why was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I'll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket.

Of course, he fails to notice that concentrated minority populations are often centered most heavily around urban developments where air quality is generally poorer and temperatures are generally higher – compounding factors in the development of lung conditions such as asthma. He fails to note that the still-present racial economic divide gives many minority families less access to locations or products providing cleaner air. No, in his mind, minorities are thieves and doctors are supremely gullible.

He also fails to draw a parallel between asthma and autism that should be obvious. If autism, like asthma, is a minority-driven racket, why are the diagnosis rates among racially diverse populations not significantly higher than among Caucasians. Again, he is presenting his information so that his audience infers conclusions that are simply untrue.

Of the parents I come in contact with on a daily basis, those of my autistic children have some of the highest expectations. They are the most consistent, the most structured. They go above and beyond to ensure their children can function properly in a social world. In fact, if money was the issue, as Mr. Savage suggests, these parents picked the wrong disorder. Getting insurance to help with autism treatment can be a difficult task.

Are there misdiagnoses? Of course, especially since the academic and medical communities' understanding of autism is still evolving. However, it's much harder to misdiagnose autism and much easier to later catch a misdiagnosis than with some other learning disabilities such as ADHD. An autism label is not an excuse, nor is it a cop-out. It is a flag that this child does need help in specific areas, and the goal is that of independence – not reliance.

Mr. Savage wraps up with this jewel.

If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, "Don't behave like a fool." The worst thing he said -- "Don't behave like a fool. Don't be anybody's dummy. Don't sound like an idiot.

You know, that's actually good advice. I just wish Mr. Savage and the uncounted other pundits with a venue to vent would take it. The world would be a quieter, less angry place, and the autistic population would enjoy that immensely.

Update: Gedblog provides some more commentary, and the author wonders what kind of backlash these remarks could gather from parents of autistic children.

via Media Matters

Tags: media, opinion, asd, education

Yesterday, Al Gore gave the United States a daring challenge.

…But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation's problems, we need a new start.

That's why I'm proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It's not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Whether or not you believe the climate crisis is real, Mr. Gore's challenge is one worthy of the great minds and innovative scientists in this country.

Consider the number of heart and lung diseases that are caused or aggravated by air pollution and how much more healthy we, as a nation, would be if we could eliminate this form of pollution entirely. Additionally, our current economy is completely reliant on fossil fuels. Rising fuel prices effect everything – from filling your car to airline tickets to grocery prices to school field trips. The oil companies in particular form a sort of hydraulic despotism upon which our entire societal balance hinges.

Pursuing an energy policy that temporarily reduces the price of fossil fuels changes none of this. It is putting an Band-Aid on a tumor. The problem only appears to go away while, underneath, it continues to grow and deepen. It is a policy that only further entrenches our addiction to fossil fuels. Furthermore, the myth that expanding drilling will somehow lower fuel prices is just that: a myth.

Instead, our policies should be aiming toward obsolescing fossil fuels in energy production.

Mr. Gore cites increased efficiency and economy of sustainable energy sources as well as entrepreneurs, investors, and inventors pushing these innovations to their limits. He reminds us that our world is more than capable of meeting our energy needs without us ripping it to pieces.

What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don't cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?

We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.

As the stone age, the bronze age, and the iron age have all passed, it's time for the carbon age to close. Mass market energy production technology can move beyond the principles of last century, but timid steps will never reach the goal. We need an audacious vision.

President Kennedy did not say that we put put a man in space with a long-term goal of the moon should it be proven feasible. FDR did not say the only thing we have to fear is the possibility of hard work. Abraham Lincoln did not call out for a phased release of a percentage of slaves over a fifty-year period. DIfferences are not made when the leadership is apprehensive. Mr. Gore is providing us with a bold challenge. Now we just need bold leadership to help guide us there.

Update: Ars Technica provides some great commentary on how this plan can ultimately benefit our culture – whether or not the goal is actually met in ten years. Read the article here.

Tags: environment, opinion

I need to start this piece by stating a simple fact: I am not a movie person. Two movies a year is usually my limit. This year will probably turn out to be four, but I only went to one of those because I was being a friend. (The fact that I did enjoy Iron Man does not negate the fact that I went against my better judgment.)

That said, the wife and I usually try to make it to the latest Pixar offering. With the possible exception of the overly-formulaic Cars, Pixar never lets us down, and no movie demonstrates their mastery of storytelling as does Wall-E. Set in a world devastated by human pollution, Wall-E crafts a touching story of hope, love, and friendship – the most basic of human experiences – through its memorable automated protagonists. With few characters and minimal dialogue, the Pixar team has created a deep and gratifying film experience.

It's a movie that is both charming and audacious. It's cautionary as it is humorous. In many ways, Wall-E defies traditional categorization by introducing us to characters and events the children will love while weaving subtexts that demand reaction from the adults. Wall-E does not draw the adult audience in through the traditional cheap ploys of subtle in-jokes or innuendo. No, under the special effects, anthropomorphized robots, and physical humor lay a scathing commentary about the self-destructive, self-centered, and overly commercial culture in which we thrive.

Few intelligent adults will be able to walk away without hearing echos of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth woven through the narrative, without seeing corporate entities such as Wal-Mart reflected in Buy 'N Large, without hearing Bush-like rhetoric from Shelby Forthright. The movie challenges the adults in the audience, but it does so in a way that is compelling and ultimately non-threatening.

Wall-E is a masterpiece of animation, both from storytelling and technical standpoints. It is a work of art, and it is one of Disney's most daring productions. Wall-E succeeds on multiple levels, and I strongly recommend going to the theaters to see it.

Oh, and the Stanley Kubrick references are merely icing on the cake.

Tags: movies, opinion

Despite claims of Fox News and other Republican mouthpieces, Barack Obama has been very consistent in speech and practice. As the late Frank Herbert might have put it, his words and actions agree with each other (and much more so than those of his rival). One glaring exception to this rule, however, has been Obama's support for the FISA bill recently passed by the House of Representatives – a bill that his most adamant of supporters are strongly opposed to and a bill that supports retroactive telecom immunity, an issue the senator has historically opposed.

Sen. Obama has been fairly quiet on the issue, but yesterday he sent out a response that's also on his site. Here are some quotes:

This was not an easy call for me. I know that the FISA bill that passed the House is far from perfect. I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush Administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses. That's why I support striking Title II from the bill, and will work with Chris Dodd, Jeff Bingaman and others in an effort to remove this provision in the Senate.

His claim is that he's still opposed to the retroactive immunity for telecoms that may have violated the law. I am forced to wonder how his vote will go should the immunity clause remain intact.

But I also believe that the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year. The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any President or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited.

Okay, so far so good.

Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise. I do so with the firm intention -- once I’m sworn in as President -- to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.

In other words, he seems to see this as a temporary compromise he hopes to rectify in the future – assuming he wins the general election. I'm cautiously optimistic that he'll keep his word on this, but I, along with many of his supporters, would like to see a little more backbone at this moment. On the other hand, perhaps now is not the time for rigid idealism that could gridlock the system. After all, rigid idealism brought us to where we are today.

One comment I saw regarding this explanation put it very well: "If this decision were made in a vacuum, without a series of other 'drift to ther center' moves, your position would be plausible." Indeed, some of Obama's recent positions and statements seem slightly contrary to his nature without being outright contradictions. It's a move we've seen other Democratic presidential candidates take. Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton all swerved toward the center of the field during their campaigns, and they all eventually lost.

While I still firmly believe Obama is a better presidential candidate for many reasons – energy policy, healthcare reform, education, international relations, to name a few – I fear he may begin to lose his base if he takes his campaign in a more centrist route. Arianna Huffington puts it well:

Go to YouTube and watch the concession speeches of Kerry, Gore, and Hillary Clinton, each of whom decided to run to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters.
…
Tape to your mirror the poll results from July 2004, where Kerry was up by six, and June of 1988, where Dukakis was up by 15... and don't get complacent.
…
When Bobby Kennedy was agonizing over whether or not to run in 1968, he told one of his advisors: "People are selfish. But they can also be compassionate and generous, and they care about the country. But not when they feel threatened. That's why this is such a crucial time. We can go in either direction. But if we don't make a choice soon, it will be too late to turn things around. I think people are willing to make the right choice. But they need leadership. They're hungry for leadership." Forty years later, we are starving for it.

Senator Obama, we the people have been hoping for some kind of shift in government that reflects an interest in us and respect for us. I hope this FISA bill is an exception and that you truly are prepared to be that change you say you represent.

Update: Obama voted for the bill with immunity intact. I wonder if he realizes how much this single act is undermining the message of his campaign to this point.

Tags: politics, opinion

Chicago Tribune writers Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss recently wrote an article about Rev. Jeremiah Wright (with digressions regarding Dick Cheny, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton) regarding his military service and how we, as a nation, define patriotism. In this article, the authors opine:

Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those who merely talk about their love of the country?

In this context, the authors implicitly ask (though it is not the thrust of the article) about what standards we use to judge character and how we assess the quality of a person from the information we have on that individual.

I would wager that most of us know about Rev. Jeremiah Wright because of his ties to presidential candidate Barack Obama. I would also wager that most of what you've heard about him centers around a specific ~30-second video clip where he proclaims condemnation against America (or, specifically, our current administration and its policies). We've seen the video looped dozens of times, but does this audio bite give us a clear picture of who Jeremiah Wright is?

I would venture to say it does not.

How many of us could have our reputations harmed if we were judged by a random thirty-second bite of our lives? How many of us have never said or done something others might find questionable, objectionable, or downright offensive – especially if taken out of context. This hypothetical edit of our lives is all someone else has by which to judge us. Do we really want that?

The Reverend Wright is an example of this soundbite judgment. How many of us knew anything at all about him prior to this brouhaha? Conversely, how many of us tried to find anything meaningful out about him afterwards? Here are some bullet points you might not have known about Rev. Wright:

• He has a wife and five children.
• He gave up a student deferment to serve in the Marines at the age of 20.
• He graduated as valedictorian from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
• He later graduated as salutatorian from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
• He served as part of President Lydon B. Johnson's medical team.
• The White House awarded him with three letters of commendation by 1967.
• He has been a professor for and served on the board of Chicago Theological Seminary.
• He has been honored by Ebony magazine as one of their top fifteen preachers.

In putting context to the influences and history that have shaped Rev. Wright's views and even bitterness, Barack Obama said:

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

He also outlines much of the good Rev. Wright has been responsible for:

The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

This took about fifteen seconds of casual Internet research, and, already, here is a far more complete picture of a man the media wants to portray as a two-dimensional, anti-American radical.

A Brief Tangent on the Media and Its Portrayal of Public Figures

In an October 2007 article of Vanity Fair looking back at the 2000 election, Dan Rather had some interesting things to say regarding the media's role in public perception of political figures:

"Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures," says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. "Someone draws a caricature, and it's funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, 'Aw shucks, that's too simple.' In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom." He notes, "I do not except myself from this criticism."

The article goes on to point out exactly how Gore and Bush were characterized in that election:

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, "Eddie Haskell," the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, "It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were."

The basic problem here is a simple one: news programs do not exist to inform you so much as they exist to entertain you with information. Therefore, a media outlet such as NBC Nightly News, CNN, Fox News, and even many blogs will present facts about individuals in as sensational a way as possible to support a nearly fictional drama of events – especially when it comes to politics.

The reasons behind this are simple. News outlets are ad-driven revenue resources. Television programs sell commercial space. Print sources sell ad space, and websites secure advertisement revenue based on page hits. What will attract more attention to drive up advertisement revenue then – a story that rationally looks at some ill-informed remarks in context and discusses the influences that might have led to such statements or a story that vilifies said individual by focusing in the most negative aspect possible?

The media focuses on two-dimensional portrayals of politically hot figures because it makes money – not because it makes you a more informed voter.

Back to the Point

This brings us back to Rev. Wright. Does all of this make his remarks okay? I don't think so. Again quoting Barack Obama:

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems...

However, if we take a minute to turn away from the hype and look at the person, such remarks are easier to understand. It is more difficult to vilify the man because now he is more real. He is tangible. He is no longer a stereotyped character who exists on a 30-second YouTube video merely as fodder for controversy. He is a human like you and me, and we should therefore judge him as we would want to be judged ourselves.

Matthew 7:1-2 is one of the most misused passages of the Bible, but I think it is particularly relevant at this point.

Judge not, that you be not judged, for with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured unto you.

I would encourage all of us, as we continue into this election season, to be careful of soundbite judgments, to be careful of jumping to conclusions about an individual based on a snippet of information a media outlet deems sensational enough for its purposes. I imagine no one reading this blog would want their lives, beliefs, and values judged in such a way, so let's show enough reason and kindness to extend that same courtesy to public figures as well.

Tags: opinion, politics, media

From Disks to Discs

image from stock.xchng

Like the floppy disk of the eighties and early nineties, the CD-ROM has become ubiquitous with computing. Apple, along with Sony, was among the first computer manufacturers to eschew diskette drives in their computers to rely entirely on optical media. The iMac, released in 1998, was widely criticized for its lack of a floppy disk drive, abandoning a technology that was still widely used. In fact, it's not unusual to still see floppy drives on computers these ten years later. By contrast, it was not long before all Apple computers were without floppy drives in standard configurations.


image courtesy Apple, Inc.

Apple bet on a few things. Hard drives were growing large enough to store user documents and files without the meager additional space allotted by floppies. CD-ROMs would become the dominant media for shipping and installing applications, and email would provide a viable means of sharing documents with others. All of these came to be, but early adopters of Apple's diskette-less products did have some hurdles to overcome initially. I remember because I was one of them.

Today, floppy disks are all but useless. Zip drives, SuperDisks, and Sony HiFD all failed to revitalize the technology. Optical disks became the dominant portable media for computers, and they remain so to this day.

Imagining a World Without Discs

While not the first laptop to ship sans optical drive (Lenovo does and Gateway used to), the recent MacBook Air has probably received the most attention for this omission. Apple products garner a great deal of hype and media coverage – more than any other computer hardware manufacturer – so it comes as no surprise this anti-feature is at the center of much attention.


image from stock.xchng

In the case of the MacBook Air, Apple is doing something that they never did for the omission of floppy disk drives. They are offering first-party solutions, Remote Disc and a USB-powered SuperDrive in this instance. However, the move cannot be denied. Does Apple view optical media as becoming obsolete – at least in terms of computing? Will future Macintosh products begin dropping optical drives the way they recently dropped modems?

This may seem far-fetched, but some replacements to optical media are already on the horizon. For one, we have flash drives. If I need to quickly share documents or files with a nearby computer, I simply toss those files onto the flash drive attached to my keychain and pop it into an available USB port. As far as backup goes, external hard drives and flash storage devices (for small stuff) are already affordable enough to offer a compelling alternative to burning CDs or DVDs of data.

I don't think it's beyond the realm of imagination to envisions packaged software coming on small flash drives as opposed to optical media in the future. Even the most complicated of professional software is seldom more than a few hundred megabytes. With the exception of games, commercial operating systems are the only form of packaged software I can think of more than a couple gigabytes in size. Could you imagine installing Office by popping a USB flash drive into your computer rather than a CD?

Digital distribution is the other potential replacement for optical media. Already, films, music, independent software, and many video games can be purchased and downloaded online. Services like iTunes allow you to purchase or rent feature length films without having to open a box. Games as large as Halo: Combat Evolved and Burnout 3: Takedown are available for download on XBox Live Arcade. Isn't it feasible to imagine purchasing Photoshop directly from Adobe, downloading the entire application as a disk image, and then installing the software from that disk image? I could even back up the image to an external hard drive or flash drive in case of deletion or a system restore.

These solutions are not without problems. Affordable bandwidth comes to mind, and sometimes you just want to burn a DVD of some special event to share with others. However, the solutions will come with time, perhaps even through wholly unexpected means. The MacBook Air may be currently handicapped by its lack of an optical drive, but, ten years from now, we may be considering those same devices largely useless.

Tags: opinion, technology

Sibelius 5 is the most recent version of the composition and music layout tools by Sibelius Software. It is also the first version to ship as a Universal Binary for Macintosh computers – making a very anticipated release. The previous PPC versions run terribly on Intel Macs, so I was excited to download a demo for the most recent version.

Installation was as simple as can be hoped with any OS X application. Simply drag the application to your Applications folder, and you're done. The rest of the application feels much more Mac-like than version 4 did, but some strangeness still exists. The most obvious example is the application toolbar, which just looks out-of-place.


Other visual bugs exist throughout various dialog boxes, but this strange piece of UI design stares at you all the time Sibelius is open. Regardless, the rest of Sibleius' interface is very simple an unobtrusive.


clean and simple – Sibelius does a good job at avoiding distraction

The New Features

Sibelius 5 features features some enhancements and new functionality over previous versions. Panorama view removes all page breaks from your score and views everything in one infinitely continuous horizontal system, creating a simpler way of viewing the music you are working on.


an instrumental part in Panorama view

Sibelius 5 also makes it easy to extract parts. This was really a new feature with version 4, called Dynamic Parts, but, since I'm still using Sibelius 3 at home, this feature continues to impress. You simply write your score, choose a part from a menu, and the part immediately appears. This is a huge timesaver.

Another innovation to Sibelius 5 is the Ideas Hub. Using this feature is pretty similar to using loops in programs like GarageBand, and it's a fantastic addition to this application. SImply put, if you think of something off the top of your head, you can notate it out, open the Ideas window and save the clip of music until you are ready to use it – a simple process of copy and paste. Even better, you can listen to the music clips in the Ideas window, and double-clicking one of the snippets allows you to edit the notation.


viewing and editing an Idea

When I wrote about SIbelius 4 (which I never bought because the Intel Macs came along), I was pretty critical of Sibelius' fairly lame selection of quality samples when compared to Finale. While I still feel Finale has the better sample collection, Sibelius 5 has drastically improved in this area, including over 150 high quality instrument sounds. (Of course, many more can be purchased separately.) Also, Sibelius has gained support for VST and Audio Units – giving users greater flexibility in choosing virtual instruments from other manufacturers.

Other improvements include an improved equalizer, special measure numbering, easier cues, and instrument doubling in parts. Sibelius 5 also includes a font that writes the name of the note inside the notehead – a great addition for those of us working with younger musicians.

Conclusion

Overall, Sibelius 5 is a very nice improvement over previous versions. Unfortunately, some interface bugs are annoying, and I'm beginning to question the priority of Macintosh development at Sibelius Software in recent years. Back in the early days of OS X, Sibelius showed up the competition time and again in adopting new Macintosh technologies quickly and effectively. Recently, however, the Mac versions of Sibelius feel more of an afterthought. I hope I'm wrong, but $600 is an awful lot to spend on software that sometimes just feels buggy. Fortunately, bugs can be fixed.

Compared to its competition, SIbelius feels much more intuitive than Finale, and it is far more capable than Encore or other similar products. Both Finale and Sibelius have distinctive strengths and weaknesses as composing solutions, but Sibelius has the edge in my book. For the most part, it gets out of the way and lets me concentrate on my creativity, which is exactly what this kind of software should do.

Tags: software, sibelius, opinion

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

I will be the first to admit that I have a hard time wrapping my head around spreadsheets and spreadsheet applications. I find that Pages (or Word) does all I need for the tables and charts I usually need. Consequently, I rarely touch applications like Excel, so some trepidation went into writing this overview. However, the more I used Numbers, the less daunting the application seemed.

Usually, when you open a spreadsheet application, you see something like this:

a blank spreadsheet in NeoOffice Calc

This interface is daunting in its sheer lack of guidance. Of course, you could always follow a Wizard of some sort, but those can be equally as frustrating. It was with some surprise that opening Numbers (and choosing one of the offered templates) resulted in this:

Numbers' grade book template

Templates are present in Excel as well, but the simple flexibility of the templates in Pages makes them much more attractive to use.

Numbers takes an approach to spreadsheets very similar to creating a basic document. Sheets are arranged along the side as page thumbnails would be in Pages or slides in Keynote. Tables themselves are treated like objects and are each self-contained spreadsheets within your larger document. If you are comfortable with how the other iWork applications handle document objects, Numbers will feel pretty familiar. On the other hand, users who are very comfortable in Excel might need some adjustment.

selecting tables and basic formulas from the toolbar

Fortunately, this document-like approach makes it much easier to create spreadsheets that will print out predictably – something I've always had problems accomplishing the few times I've used Calc or Excel. For even further refinement, Numbers features a print view that is fully interactive and allows you to have complete control over how the spreadsheet document looks.

Working with data seems intuitive in Numbers as well. For example, if a cell is set up to calculate a formula, an editor appears atop to the cell when you select it (as opposed to being at the top of the screen or inside the cell where it might not fit).

editing an equation in cell E3

I also noticed that selecting a graph tied to the data in a specific table highlights the table, clearly indicating how the data is correlated. It's a small touch but a nice one.

the colors in the table match up with the graph

As far as Excel compatibility goes, I haven't been able to test the exporting quality, but NeoOffice Calc has had little success opening Numbers-exported Excel documents. Importing a very large Excel worksheet I have from school resulted in very few errors, and Numbers informs you of any issues when you import.

import errors

Numbers furthermore lacks support for Excel macros as well as AppleScript (a strange omission). I found little else to complain about, but I've read that performance suffers if you create large tables.

In all, Numbers adds a needed component to the iWork suite, and it does so with an approach that is both fresh and accessible. Serious power users and businesses might find the application limiting, but Numbers should capably fill the needs of most home users. I could write for quite a while about how simple conditional formatting and equation editing is, about how much easier Numbers is on the eyes when compared to other spreadsheet apps, or a plethora of other topics. However, I'll just wrap up by saying that I could actually see myself voluntarily opening and using Numbers – something I cannot say about any other spreadsheet application I've used before.

For further reading on Numbers:

• Mac Thought Crime: Numbers rocks: how I forgot about the review and ended up doing my budget
• Macworld Review: Numbers '08

Tags: software, iwork, opinion

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

Pages was packaged with Keynote in 2005 in the first iteration of iWork. Pages received decidedly mixed reviews, but Apple has continued to improve its page layout application over time, resulting in the most recent version.

Initially, Pages was not a word processor (like how most people use Microsoft Word). Rather it focused on page layout more akin to Microsoft Publisher or Adobe FrameMaker. Indeed, you could use Pages for simple word processing, and I have done so on many occasions. Unfortunately, Pages has offered such a fundamentally different approach to creating documents than Word that a perceived learning curve is in place. This harmed Pages popularity quickly.

Now, in version 3, Pages is truly reaching maturity as a product. However, compared with other documenting applications, its interface is very clean and uncluttered. Compare the screenshots below of Pages running on Mac OS X and Word 2003 on Windows XP.

x

A lack of clutter is not indicative of a lack of functionality, however, and Pages is packing a lot of enhancements and a few new features under its hood. The first thing I noticed was a detail that might skirt by most users – its install size. One would expect Pages 3 to be larger than Pages 2, but quite the opposite is true.

x

As you can see, Pages has lost considerable weight from one version to the next – dropping nearly 600 MB. (Also, Keynote has lost about 1 GB off its size. I wonder how they trimmed the applications' weights to such an extent.)

When the Template Chooser is brought up, there are many new templates to choose from, and they are now divided between "Word Processing" and "Page Layout."


Word Processing offers much more basic templates than Page Layout

Regardless of the mode you use, Pages behaves basically the same once you begin creating your document. Like, Keynote, Pages has had a toolbar facelift and has received Instant Alpha and Photo Frame capabilities. Pages has also gained a contextual Formatting Bar, and this little widget quickly makes the application much more usable as a word processor. Prior to this release, to change fonts, you had to open a separate pane, and all basic formatting options were most easily accessible through a pane called an Inspector. (On the upside, I personally grew very comfortable with keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand, this turned off several potential users.)

Now, similarly to Office 2007, a small bar is present beneath the main toolbar icons that customizes itself to the part of the document you are currently working with.


working with text


editing chart properties


editing a picture

This Formatting Bar is extremely useful and all but eliminates the need to resort to the Inspector for anything but the most tedious of settings. This is a welcome addition, and the only criticism I have is that the bar is very small. There seems to be no way to make the bar larger, and this could prove a problem for users with less than ideal eyesight.

Pages has also gained some more refined equation editing for charts that seems to come directly from Numbers, the new spreadsheet application bundled in iWork '08. In the Inspector, you can set conditions and basic equations with a simple click, and the formula editor automatically appears overs selected cells that are set to respond to formulas. I'm not sure if all of these features are new to Pages 3, but this is the first time I've noticed them – making certain tables much easier and more intuitive to generate than before.

setting conditional formatting


the new equation editor

Finally, Pages 3 features better compatibility with Word documents than its predecessors – even compatibility with Office 2007 Office Open XML files. This also applies to change tracking, which would not translate from Pages to Word or vice versa prior to this release. Now Mac users can use NeoOffice or iWork to interact with Office XML files. Ironically, a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac featuring this capability is not due out until early next year.

With Pages, Apple has made some relatively small changes that drastically effect its usability. In some regards, it feels like a new program altogether. I've been fond of Pages since its release and have used it pretty regularly. These enhancements will only serve to increase my use of and enjoyment with this application.

For more reading on Pages:

• Apple's Pages site
• Macworld: First Look at Pages '08

Tags: software, iwork, opinion

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

Keynote is the original member of what would eventually become iWork. It was released in 2003 and has seen three major updates since them, each bringing new functionality as well as general improvements.

One thing I noticed immediately in Keynote '08 was that the toolbar icons seem to have received some attention. I think this may be the first facelift the toolbar has received since the initial release. The toolbar is now unified, and the new icons are more illustrative than photographic.

Keynote '06 toolbar

Keynote '08 toolbar

The toolbar icons do not seem to be resolution independent, nor does the application icon support a 512x512 resolution, both expected due to the impending release of Leopard. However, digging through Keynote's packaged resources, I did find some icons for iChat Theater, which is a Leopard feature. Perhaps new icons will come in a software update. (I also noticed some other organizational differences in the package that I'll have to keep in mind when digging for resources.)

As far as visual enhancements to presentations go, Keynote '08 comes with a few new themes, transitions, and build effects, along with a new way of animating text and objects called Smart Builds.

You can see all the new themes above. My wife is very fond of Harmony, and I like Vellum and Industrial the most. I'm not too fond of Craft or Stock Book personally, but many of you will have different opinions. No Keynote themes seem to have been removed from the previous version in this upgrade, which is a first.

There are a few new 3D slide transitions: color planes, confetti, and swap, and there is one new 2D transition called Blur. New build animations include comet, confetti, drift, flame (which is terrible), and sparkle. Text builds contain all of these plus blast, bouncy, confetti, convergence, and squish. Some builds and transitions are amusing, needing to be avoided in professional presentations at all costs, while others like blur and drift can be quite dramatic.

Smart Builds create a sophisticated animation between objects – rotating or flipping between images. Really, seeing is better than explaining, so here's a video:

Click here for video

Another new visual flair comes by way of path animations, called Action Builds in Keynote. Basically you can determine a path for text or an image to follow, but the neat thing is that the object can change states while progressing along its path. For example, an image can change size or opacity during its transition. You can set items to move along a straight or a curved path. Again, showing is better than explaining:

Click here for video

Keynote has gained some interface refinements in a smart formatting bar (which I will talk more about in the Pages overview) and live image resizing within a mask – making the task of resizing masked objects far less tedious than the preceding version of Keynote. Also, you can now record your voice in sync with your slides and animations. Couple this with the fact that Keynote integrates with iTunes and Garageband, and you have a nice way of sharing your presentations with audio. The recording options are limited, but patience will yield decent results.

Another advertised new feature is Instant Alpha, which brings another image editing capability to Keynote (like shape masking and Image Adjust in the previous version). Instant Alpha is designed to quickly and easily remove backgrounds from photographs.

x

It's important that the background is pretty solid and distinctly contrasts from the main image. Otherwise, the results can get messy. It's a feature that works well enough to be a timesaver, but it can't altogether replace a more professional graphics app if you use alpha transparencies a lot. (Hint: using shadows can hide rough edges in the Instant Alpha transparency.)

FInally, it's possible to add special frames around images in Keynote slides outside the usual shadows and lines. In the object inspector, there is a Picture Frame option under "Stroke," and you will be able to choose from twelve different frames available to that theme. It's not a huge feature, but both my wife and I would have loved this option with some projects we did last year and earlier this year.



That covers most of Keynote's new features. Most of it is good stuff, and I've only run into a couple bugs so far. The only problem with all of these great improvements is avoiding going overboard when creating a presentation. If you have a Mac, you really should own iWork, and I think that will become more evident as we look at more of this application suite.

For more reading on Keynote's new features:

• Apple's Keynote Page
• Keynote User: Quick Keynote '08 New Feature List
• Macworld: First Look: Keynote '08

And don't forget to check out my iWork tagged Flickr photos!

Tags: software, opinion, iwork, keynote

Apple's press event today contained virtually no true surprises, but that doesn't mean there isn't some good stuff here for any tech enthusiast to get excited about.

New iMac

The new iMac is very similar in form to its predecessor but just a tad sleeker. They took a good design and made it better. Just for reference, here's a picture of the previous model and the new side by side.



I'm not too sure what else to write about this upgrade. The specs are nice, and the prices are even better than before – especially on the higher end models. I've already written a bit about the new keyboard. I like the looks, but I'd definitely want to get my hands on one before purchasing. (But it would look nice attached to my old but reliable PowerMac G5...)

The only weird bit is the wireless version of the keyboard. It has no number pad. It's layout is basically that of a laptop keyboard – which is what I primarily use. However, some consumers and business folks might not like that.

the wireless keyboard

iLife '08

This came as a surprise to me because I really wasn't expecting iLife to be upgraded until Leopard came out this October. Among other improvements, iPhoto has gained the ability to automatically show or hide given photos in your library. It has a new organization option called "Events," and it has gained the ability to publish to a [dot] Mac web gallery with some sleek effects.

iDVD has received some new themes and better encoding while iMovie looks like a whole new application (with a new icon even). It can now manage videos (a la iPhoto) as well as create. iMovie integrates with [dot] Mac and YouTube, and it features a retooled interface for making movie creation even easier. I guess Apple felt like they needed to do something new with this app since Windows Movie Maker was so capably aping it!

iMovie

iWeb has seen some basic improvements in theme handling, and it now supports personal domains. It features Google Maps and Adsense integration as well as Web Widgets – showcasing content from other sites like Twitter, Flickr, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the blogging component has received much attention based on the website. Finally, GarageBand comes with new arranging and automation capabilities as well as a new visual equalizer. Magic GarageBand is a new mode that allows you to quickly experiment with and create new music.

In all, the upgrades are pretty small, but the enhancements to iMovie seem worth the price alone.

iWork '08

This was another upgrade that I thought would not be coming until after Leopard (and one I'll be posting some more on after I finish downloading the 469 MB demo). It turns out, according to John Gruber, iWork installs the Leopard ImageKit for Tiger users. I wonder if any other apps can take advantage of ImageKit once it's there.

Keynote features new path animations (huzzah), new text effects, transitions, and themes, and it has a new feature called Instant Alpha that is supposed to remove the background from an image. I'm assuming the background needs to be solid, but I'll find out when I start playing around. Pages seems to have borrowed a trick from Microsoft with contextual toolbars. It also features separate modes for word processing and page layout, and its tracking feature is now compatible with Word.


the new contextual toolbar

The big news in iWork is a new spreadsheet application called Numbers that claims Excel compatibility. It features the same simple interface as Keynote and Pages, and it offers flexible ways to analyze variable in your data to see instantaneous results. I'm going to be doing a lot of spreadsheet work this coming school year, so this application really intrigues me.


Numbers

Other Updates

A few other products got quiet upgrades today. The Mac mini was boosted to Core 2 Duo processors and 1 GB of default memory. Airport Extreme received gigabit ethernet. [dot] Mac storage was bumped to 10 GB (from 1 GB) with 100 GB of monthly data transfer as well as new web gallery support and server-side spam filtering, which should make some iPhone users happier. Finally, the MacPro gets a new PCI RAID option for those of you with an extra $999 laying around.

All in all, it's been a busy day in Apple product news. My favorite bits are the iWork upgrade and the new iMac, but I'm also happy about the bumped [dot] Mac storage. I'll be back on in a couple of days with some iWork '08 impressions!

all images in this post are courtesy Apple, Inc.

Tags: macintosh, opinion, software

I saw this a while ago but forgot to post about it. It seems Microsoft is subtly trying to steal thunder from Ubuntu nowadays. Compare below and ask, "Could this be mere coincidence?" I think not.


Here is the Ubuntu logo.


Here is the Microsoft Alumni Network logo.

Aping a Linux distribution logo? I mean really. Props to whoever pointed this out to me...

Tags: technology, microsoft, opinion, linux

A couple of weeks ago, I laid out my opinion of the type of commentary we get from individuals like Ann Coulter. Later, I ran across a YouTube video of Coulter ranting defending herself on MSNBC's Morning Joe. A couple quotes right at the beginning struck me as interesting:

"...and I'm a little sick of being browbeaten..."

I find this terribly ironic since so much of the criticism laid out against her focuses on her demeaning and browbeating others. Coulter claims to be a Christian, so this should be a simple lesson: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." If she doesn't want people to level personal attacks against her, she should first clean up her own act.

"...I have written five New York Times bestsellers. People like the way I write..."

In other words, she is taking the very conservative approach of validation through market success. The market has decided she is a good author, so that must mean everything she says or writes is justified and above criticism. If we follow this logic, here are some other authors and books that have been market approved:

• God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
• The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
• Outrage by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
• It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
• The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken
• America (The Book) by Jon Stewart
• Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore
• My Life by Bill Clinton

I could go on and on here. The point is that she would have no problem criticizing these New York Times bestsellers, so why should she think that status somehow exempts her from the same? Furthermore, games like the Grand Theft Auto series, God of War, Gears of War, and Manhunt have been market successes, but I doubt Coulter would endorse any of them. (I'm not very informed about movies and TV shows, so I'll let you come up with your own examples.)

Some media personalities have defended Coulter saying she brings up real issues that need discussing, and I can see where they are coming from. However, as long as those issues are bing wrapped in senselessly insensitive remarks, insults, and derogatory comments, I don't want to listen. Regardless of your values, political agenda, or religious background, petty attacks demean and hinder the political dialogue in this country – and they encourage more knee-jerk responses than they do honest examination and discussion.

I'm going to stop talking about this now. I promise.

Tags: opinion, politics, media

Okay, I am a firm supporter of freedom-of-speech. I write a blog. I rely on my First Amendment rights from time-to-time. However, I do believe anyone who shares their opinion with the public – especially in a widely-consumed medium such as, say, TV – has a great responsibility to discuss differences civilly, in good character, and respectfully. After all, what you say in these venues has far-reaching impacts – much more than one might have sitting in his or her living room.

In this light, I find it completely understandable that radio host Don Imus was dismissed after his most recent foray into racist comments. He did have a long history of doing so, and enough was enough. However, I'm also a big fan of consistency. I know, it's an idealistic flaw, but I can't fathom why some other media pundits get away with what they say time and time again. Take Ann Coulter for example. (Disclosure: Please note that these YouTube videos are posted by political bloggers, so some bias is noticeable.)

Why Coulter? Two recent examples:



What was that again?

"If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

This isn't the first time she's wished death on others in public either. In 2002, she said:

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

Uh-huh. Also, let's not forget this gem:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Okay, that's just sick. Does this mean she doesn't really mind that so many people died in Oklahoma City so much as the fact that no one in the NYT building has been brutally and inhumanely murdered? The mind reels. Absolutely reels.

Example number two:



Regardless of how you feel about Obama's speech (and there is a lot in it that could be debated healthily and respectfully), pay attention to one of the first things out of Coulter's mouth:

"I do think someone named B. Hussein Obama should avoid using hijack and religion in the same sentence."

Oh no she didn't! Last I checked, Obama goes by "Barack Obama" 100% of the time. She purposefully manipulates his name to create a terrorist correlation among her viewers! This is interesting coming from someone who claims she believes in "the dignity of all humans."

This respecter of human dignity has also publicly called both Al Gore and John Edwards "faggots." She has called other members of the media "retarded" and worthy of execution.

As a bonus quote that disrespects no one but the world we live on, here is Coulter's take on the environment:

"God says, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

DId she just use "rape" so flippantly in that sentence? I think she did.

I'm sorry about the rant-like nature of this post, but the hate speech and character smearing needs to stop on all sides – especially from those who claim to be spiritual people. In full disclosure, I would fall closer to what is described as the Religious Right than anywhere else, but I'm sick and tired of how people who might be lumped into that same category behave. Ideally, we have freedom to say and publish what we want to – what may even be necessary – without the fear of political retribution. However, that is a right that must be used responsibly in the example we set for others and the tone we foster among our fellow citizens.

Imus is off the air for his remarks. How is Ann Coulter any better?

Tags: opinion, politics, media

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Now that we've looked at RapidWeaver's improvements and drawbacks, this post will be dedicated to looking at two of RapidWeaver's alternatives on the Macintosh as well as some useful add-ons for RW.

iWeb – Apple; Preinstalled; $80 (part of iLife)
If you've bought a Mac in the last year or so, you have iWeb already. iWeb is part of Apple's excellent iLife suite of lifestyle applications. (iMovie, iDVD, Garageband, and iPhoto are also part of the iLife package.) iLife is geared toward making blogs, online newsletters, and photo galleries a simple process. It succeeds in this admirably as long as you are okay with its limitations.

Like Apple's iWork applications, iWeb is heavily template based. You choose what kind of website you want to create, and iWeb offers a set of templates you can choose from. As expected, the templates are well designed and visually pleasant.


choosing an iWeb template

Once you pick a template, editing the site is much like editing a document. You plug in images and text where appropriate, and the process is very fast and fluid. Performance is snappy, and it's possible to generate a nice looking site with little effort and no specialized web knowledge.


editing a site in iWeb

The iWeb experience is great, but the limitations become apparent quickly. First and foremost, straying from the template layout can become a pain – especially in blogging where every new entry reverts back to the default settings. Blogs do not support tags or categories, and there is no easy way to install custom templates or permanently modify those included. Finally, iWeb defaults to PNG images, which are great, but some browsers (read: Internet Explorer) do not always handle them correctly. This means your iWeb page may not look the same in different browsers.

iWeb is a nice application, and I actually prefer working in iWeb over RapidWeaver, but RapidWeaver is far superior in terms of flexibility, features, and browser compatibility.

Sandvox – Karelia Software; $50 (standard), $80 (pro)
Sandvox was introduced scant weeks before the introduction of Apple's iWeb as an alternative to RapidWeaver. Like these other applications, it's purpose is to give non-web designers a simple way to create great looking sites. Sandvox comes in two editions with the Pro version allowing for more direct code interaction and modification. Sandvox has a very unique interface and some interesting options in creating web sites.

Like iWeb and RapidWeaver, Sandvox is template based.


the template gallery

Similar to iWeb, you get to directly edit the site visually. Whenever anything is changed in a sub-page, the homepage is automatically updated to reflect that content. Also, one feature I really like in Sandvox is something called Pagelets where you can add Digg links, Flickr photostreams, RSS feeds, page counters, and other useful content to your sidebar with one click. Sandvox also boasts some nice eye candy in browsing and changing site themes.


editing a site in Sandvox

I feel like Sandvox's blogging tool is awkward, and, like iWeb, there seems to be no support for categories and tags. The templates' properties (like page-width and colors) are not easily modified, and, in stark contrast to RapidWeaver, the developer's website does not facilitate easy discovery of third-party themes, pagelets, and plug-ins. Additionally, sites created in Sandvox have a default homepage that you can't manually bypass or remove.

Out of these three apps, I like Sandvox the least, but your personal preferences may differ. Sandvox is a nice step up from iWeb, but it still falls short of RapidWeaver's standard in my opinion.

Buying Advice: RapidWeaver – Realmac Software; $50
My money went to RapidWeaver before iWeb and Sandvox were even available, but my purchasing advice hasn't changed. RapidWeaver does have a higher learning curve than these alternatives, and it does have some issues, but it is the best way to quickly and inexpensively produce a nice-looking site. It supports every feature a modern website is expected to have, and an active development community creates even more possibilities for the application.

If you already have iWeb on your computer and it meets your needs, go with it. It's a great program and produces nice web pages. However, if you want to move past iWeb's limitations, get RapidWeaver. You won't regret it.

Useful RapidWeaver Resources

Themes. The first place you might want to start expanding RapidWeaver is in your theme collection. There are a number of first and third-party themes available for free and for purchase. Some theme developers include: elixer graphics, Blue Ball Design, Multithemes, and seyDesign. Additionally, Realmac offers some additional business themes and blog themes of their own, and they showcase themes by other developers. Finally, a site called Charcoal on the Wall is a good place to go to browse and preview additional themes.

Plug-ins. Plug-ins extend RapidWeaver's functionality. For example, RapidFLV makes embedding Flash videos a simpler task. RapidBlog integrates RapidWeaver with Blogger, and YourHead Software offers a number of plug-ins designed to give your website some additional style and polish. Again, be sure to visit Relamac's page of plug-ins for even more great add-ons.

There is even more – downloadable theme styles, code snippets and even some utilities are available to enhance the RapidWeaver experience. In addition to the add-ons section of RapidWeaver's site, the RealMac forums are a great place to discover more about this application and complimentary products.

That wraps up this look at RapidWeaver 3.6. I hope you found it informative and useful – if not at least interesting. RapidWeaver is a great application for simplifying the process of making a web site. It's reasonably priced for the features it offers. It has a great development community built up around it, and I'll definitely be purchasing an upgrade license in the near future. If you have a Mac, and you are interested in setting up a website, you can't go wrong with RapidWeaver.

Tags: opinion, software, rapidweaver

Steve Jobs outlined some more info about Leopard during his Keynote speech at this years WWDC, and Apple's website has even more. Here are some of the overall impressions I've gained.

Eye Candy Is Important

One of the big changes (improvements may be debatable) in Leopard is in the visuals. Everything seems geared toward visual impressiveness. This user interface (UI) is intended to make people look at Vista and think it looks clunky.

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all images from apple.com

I've read many power-users bemoaning the fact that visual flair is becoming too emphasized in modern operating systems, and it doesn't look like that trend is reversing anytime soon. Personally, I like visual enhancements so long as they do not come at a cost to usability. The only complaint here is in the menu bar. The menus look out-of-place when invoked.


it's translucent now

iTunes = Mac Experience

Apple wants iTunes users to feel right at home in the Leopard UI – iTunes being the only Apple interface many potential users have daily contact with. As a result, the majority of the system resembles iTunes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the revamped Finder.


image from apple.com

From the window design to the sidebar to Cover Flow, the Finder basically recreates the iTunes experience in file management. The message: "If you enjoy using iTunes, you will enjoy using a Mac."

Organize Your Way

Stacks, the Dock, smart folders, Cover Flow, Quick View, Spaces – all of this gives the user greater flexibility in how he or she uses a Mac.


a stack of documents (from apple.com)


Quick View in Time Machine (from apple.com)

It's all about giving you greater flexibility and more options in how and where you access your files, media, and applications. Content is king, and Apple is giving us many ways to experience, organize, and access that content.

One Size Fits All

Steve Jobs made a joke during his talk that Leopard will come in three editions – Basic at $129, Premium at $129, and Ultimate at $129. He thinks most people will buy the Ultimate Edition. The simple fact is that you don't have to worry about which version of the OS to upgrade to because there is only one. Ease-of-use is a hallmark of the Macintosh experience, and that simplicity begins with the purchasing process.

Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on Leopard in October.

Tags: software, opinion, macintosh, leopard, wwdc, os x

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

As much as I respect and enjoy RapidWeaver as a product, there are some areas in which the software could still use improvement in the new version. Fortunately, RapidWeaver recently saw a 3.6.1 update that resolved a couple of the issues I was going to write about, so that was a welcome surprise.

Inconsistent Performance

iWeb is not one of my favorite Apple products, but one thing it has going for it is performance. It can open and save my website (100+ MB) in mere seconds, sometimes perceptually instantaneously. RapidWeaver is another story. In fact, this is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and, if this one problem was fixed, I'd be satisfied. The simple truth is that loading and saving large documents in RapidWeaver is a pain, and the new version shows no significant improvements in this area.

To test performance, I ran these tests 3-6 times, depending on application crashes and tester errors. I then averaged the numbers. The only open applications were Pages, RapidWeaver, and Activity Monitor. The test computer has a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of memory. The document is 122 MB.

Here are the averages of opening my site in RapidWeaver 3.5 and RapidWeaver 3.6:

RW 3.6 only shows real improvement in CPU usage here. RapidWeaver 3.5 suffered two application crashes in this test, and version 3.6 suffered zero. Anecdotally, I've had version 3.5 take up to two minutes to load my site document on several occasions.

Here are the numbers for saving:

Note that version 3.6 is actually more resource-hungry that 3.5 in saving the same document. Neither version crashed while saving. Annoyingly, my computer becomes basically unusable during the saving process, and, again, I've encountered numerous occasions where RapidWeaver 3.5 has taken much longer to save a file than these numbers show.

FInally, take a look at RapidWeaver's overall memory usage. This is memory usage while completely idle:

While using RapidWeaver, it gradually consumes more and more resources. Unfortunately, after quitting, those resources sometimes stay tied up, leaving the computer in a state where performance is going to be generally poor – forcing a restart to reclaim that memory.

This is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and again, I would be happy if performance was the only big issue the Realmac team tackled for version 3.7. I don't know how many other RapidWeaver users share this opinion, but fantastic new features can be tarnished when the most basic tasks – loading and saving – are an aversive experience.

Other Issues

I really only a few additional complaints about RapidWeaver 3.6. The inability to create tables within the application is a pain. (The tables in this post are screenshots of Pages.) Not all included themes take advantage of the Theme Styles I praised in the previous post. All new themes have flexible color settings while many of the older themes do not. It would also be nice if user's could link to hosted images rather than embedding them into the blog file. Finally, there is still no easy way to set a site's default font. If I want my blog to be in a different font, I would either have to edit the css file or change the font one entry at a time.

That's really it as far as criticism goes. RapidWeaver is a very nice application with just a few small issues. For me, performance is the biggest issue, and, if that could be resolved, RapidWeaver 3.6 would be a near-perfect application for my purposes.

In the next post about RapidWeaver, I'll share some info about competing products, useful add-ons, and buying advice for version 3.6.

Update: You can in fact link to images in the blog editor. You just have to use "img src=" bracketed by < >. (I was making a mistake!)

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Though the blogging tool is certainly the most important to me, RapidWeaver has seen some further improvements in its most recent point release. In this post, we'll take a look at some of those other enhancements.

Photo Albums

The interface for creating photo albums has hardly changed at all, except for the removal of picture previews and the ability to add some text at the top of the album page. Those seem like strange omissions, and it makes me wonder if I am perhaps merely missing something in the interface.

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3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

The real change comes with the way the photo album module handles Flash slideshows. The previous version looked nice already, but the new slideshow offers better navigation, background audio, a variety of transitions, and the "Ken Burns" effect.

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3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

FInally, the photo album offers integration with Flickr photostreams. All you have to do is have a Flickr RSS feed, and RapidWeaver will showcase your hosted pictures.

Theme Styles

This feature has been pretty heavily emphasized, and I have to admit that it's a welcome addition to the software. In previous versions of RapidWeaver, a theme might have a predetermined set of color schemes, but, for real control, you had to resort to opening the theme package and editing the css stylesheet.

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3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

This new feature gives you nearly unlimited control over the way colors are used on your site. However, for control freaks, some css editing might still be necessary. This features is not currently implemented consistently across all themes, and we'll take a look at that in my next post.

The Kitchen Sink

RapidWeaver 3.6 also boasts a number of other small improvements that make the software even better. A Snippets pane allows you to store commonly-accessed HTML code for easy retrieval. The application has improved making lists. The various inspectors have been consolidated and simplified – making for better usability. The software also performs better overall (with a couple of caveats). In all, RapidWeaver 3.6 is an impressive update filled with great new features and welcome improvements.

In the next installment, we'll take a look at some of the issues I've run into using this software. Stay tuned!

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

I spend most of my time in the blog editor of RapidWeaver, so I'm going to concentrate on that component for the entirety of this post. You can see in the screenshots below that the interface for editing blogs has not changed much since the last version. Some interface elements have been added, but little else has changed. However, those small changes add up to some welcome new capabilities.

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3.5 on the left • 3.6 on the right

Instead of using drop-down menus for categories, RW 3.6 uses a text field that will auto-complete as you type. Tapping Return/Enter will add the category. This text field also facilitates adding multiple categories to a post – a welcome enhancement to RapidWeaver's blogging tool.


title and category in 3.5


title and categories in 3.6

Tagging works much the same way in RW 3.6. This generates a tag cloud in your sidebar with frequently-used tags appearing in larger text than more infrequently used tags. This is another feature I'm excited to see appear.

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a couple of RapidWeaver tag clouds

The only other real difference I noted in blog editing is the fact that you can now choose whether or not an entry is published from the main list. In the previous RapidWeaver version, you had to select a post first, then choose to publish it or not.



Overall, the enhancements to the blog editing tool in RapidWeaver are welcome changes. The typing of categories and tags really goes much more quickly than menus. (Fortunately, tapping Esc will bring up a list of categories and tags.)

The enhancements look minor, but they bring a lot of nice functionality to blogging with RW. I've already begun converting the blog portions of this site over to RapidWeaver 3.6, but it's going to take a while due to some snags I've run into with the migration process. (That will be a topic for a later post.) Next time we'll take a look at some of the other new features – including a nicely improved photo gallery.

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

Ever since a rather unfortunate debacle of litigation involving Apple and a couple of rumor blogs, a very legitimate question has begun to float around the Internet. Can bloggers be placed in the same general category as traditional media journalists?

Weblogs – more commonly known as blogs – come in a variety of flavors. Many are casual daily journals that act as online diaries. Some have specific topics such as law, technology, or politics. Others are aimed at professional development and self improvement. A few are just pleasantly quirky (yet intelligent). Additionally, many blogs, like my own, fall into multiple categories simultaneously. With over seventy million blogs representing peoples from all over the world, the blogging community has became a force difficult to ignore.

Fortunatley, according to a recent Ars Technica story, (also linked to in my Links Blog), the House of Representatives is beginning to realize the importance of the blogging community and the journalistic potential of the individuals involved.

From the article:

Instead of requiring journalists to be tied to a news organization, the bill now defines "journalism" to focus more on the function of the job: "the gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public."

Traditionally, one has had to be associated with an established media outlet (i.e. News Corp., CNN, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) to be considered a "real" journalist with all the rights and responsibilities associated with the label. This bill could completely change that, granting journalistic rights to any individuals documenting events that serve the public interest.

The defining of "public interest" is important, though, in that not every person who runs a blog is necessarily affected by this bill. Again, the Ars article makes this point clear:

The Free Flow of Information Act was reworked after its introduction with the specific intent of including bloggers under the broader definition of journalism. According to a section-by-section analysis of the bill, "The act would apply to web logs ('blogs') that engage in journalism." Although the law is not likely meant to include every person who writes on the Internet, it doesn't create a litmus test for what constitutes "engaging in journalism."

Some media outlets like the Newspaper Association of America and the National Association of Broadcasters are supporting this bill. While specifically aimed at the revealing of confidential sources, I think the important aspect of this bill is the credibility it lends toward bloggers.

In all truth, I have come to prefer blogs over newspapers and televised news programs when it comes to information aggregation. So much traditional media has been relegated to simply "reporting the facts" in an ADHD-inducing matter that seldom allows for deeper analysis of the issues.

In contrast, there are many blogs that are great sources of investigative reporting and political commentary, but very few of these are controlled by a corporate agenda, nor are they motivated by what stories generate the best ratings (though one online publication recently admitted to publishing fluff for the sake of page hits). They are independent world citizens who care about keeping the public well-informed and work hard to do so. That passion gives them a legitimacy that no affiliate label could ever achieve. Let me defer to Jon Stewart in his April 27 interview with Bill Moyers:

[You can] find people that are doing incredibly complex and interesting and urgent journalism ... A lot of those blog reporters and all of those things are bringing a lot of urgency and a lot of momentum to stories that wouldn't normally carry any momentum.

In a world of news dominated by celebrity gossip, miracle cures, and top 10 lists, journalistic blogs are a breath of fresh air. Can bloggers be legitimate journalists? This House bill is a firm step in the direction of "yes."

Tags: blogging, technology, opinion

The shootings at Virginia Tech are nothing short of an absolute tragedy. It pains me deeply to see any place of education turned into an unsafe environment. I want nothing more in my classroom than for my children to feel safe and secure while learning, for learning is nearly impossible in any other environment. Seeing someone randomly and maliciously robbing that blanket of security makes me sick, and I mourn the growing loss of safety in our schools.

It also makes me frustrated how individuals come out of the woodwork at times like these to further their own agendas through uninformed tactics that morbidly entice the public into either higher ratings or political support. Again, a violent act is being used to propagate the hypothetical video game-rampage link. I really wasn't going to write about this at first, but I strongly dislike these kind of blame-games being played that divert the concepts of personal accountibility and responsibility from our minds.

First up is Dr. Phil:

And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me - common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society.

I have a grudging respect for Dr. Phil (despite his former association with Oprah), but here he's taking a tried-and-true approach: "video games train our children to be murderers." However, playing Grand Theft Auto, for example, trains me in the art of killing no more than Gran Turismo makes me a better race car driver, Mario Golf makes me a better golfer, or Trauma Center makes me a better surgeon.

I agree that desensitization to violence can only be a Bad Thing™, but desensitization does not equate actions. Again, playing Mario Golf does not make me more likely to step onto a golf course at any point in my life. Likewise, having played a game like Halo does not compel me to perform acts of violence toward anyone.

Of course, Jack Thompson has a thing or two to say:

Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft, in which players join terrorism or counter-terrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns.

A game depicting counter-terrorism and warfare? You mean like this one published by the United States government? Why aren't you blaming republicans for the violence? Oh yeah, blaming Bill Gates will get more attention.

Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill ... Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? “Virginia Tech” was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one.

I feel bad for Microsoft. It was bad enough when everyone wanted to vilify them as the Evil Software Empire. Now they are a bunch of murderers too. By the way, poll a bunch of random high school-aged males. I bet more than a few of them play or have played violent video games. Two individuals out of millions does not a trend make.

Now, on a more technical note, shouldn't this rant have been addressed to Steve Ballmer, as in the man who actually runs Microsoft and has for the past seven years. I know – I'm picking nits. Calling out Bill Gates (who people have actually heard of) will get more attention, and that is all Mr. Thompson is really after.

Finally, we have a caller to the Rush Limbaugh show:

I’ll bet my last dollar in my pocket, that this shooter will be found to have been a compulsive video gamer, and when people are living that kind of lifestyle - and college students do this a lot.

I totally expected Mr. Limbaugh to take this and run with it, but he did not.

Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that… it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers.

Here, I think, is a key issue. There are 103 million PS2s in homes, 21 million GameCubes, 24 million XBoxes, almost 3 million PS3s, 6 million Wiis, 10 million XBox 360s, 17 million PSPs, 79 million GameBoy Advances, and 35 million DS units in the hands of consumers worldwide. This is only counting currently supported systems, but that equals almost 300 million current gaming products. Also, this does not count people who game on their PCs. (As a note, at 11:43 p.m. EDT, there are 177,930 PC users logged into GameSpy Live.)

You would think, with those incredible numbers, that juvenile homicide rates would be skyrocketing. However, the opposite is true:

Sternheimer notes an obvious but underemphasized figure: despite the proliferation of violent, first-person shooters in the wake of Doom, juvenile homicide rates have fallen in the decade since its release. Random school shootings remain incredibly rare; for all forms of homicide, students face a seven in 10 million chance of being a victim.

Additionally, two separate reports have recently failed to find a causal link between video games and violent behavior. One report was conducted by the British Board of Film Classification where it was noted:

... Even the "interactivity" of video games can keep gamers from getting immersed in the same way, since players are continuously reminded that they are controlling the action on-screen. The report also notes that gamers are less involved emotionally in games, in part because games often stress action over character and story development.

Also:

... Gamers almost never feel that the onscreen violence is making them more open to using violence. "I no more feel that I have actually scored a goal than I do that I have actually killed someone," said one participant. "I know it’s not real. The emphasis is on achievement."

The other is a study from the journal Psychology, Crime, & Law, noting that stable populations remain largely unaffected by video game violence:

The authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on the emotional states of the gamers when they begin play. Angry gamers will cool off, calm gamers will get agitated. They also note that only two of the cases of rising anger reached levels that would be considered cause for concern, suggesting that dangerous levels of anger were rarely triggered by gaming.

Unfortunately, video gaming is the most recent media scapegoat to cause such atrocities, joining the illustrious ranks of world religions, TV, movies, rock music, and banned books. This speaks to a deeper problem, though, in which we, as a collective consciousness, have grown overly comfortable with "passing the buck." We have our folk devils that can carry the blame, so we don't have to look in the mirror and face responsibilities we would rather avoid. Until we can wean ourselves away from the folk devils and start facing our own sense of accountability as a group entity and as individuals, tragic events such as this will not go away – no matter who or what we blame.

Tags: opinion, video games, politics, media

In the fallout of the misconduct documented on and affecting the primary author of Creating Passionate Users, conversation has started on the merits of promoting a "Blogger's Code of Conduct" spearheaded by tech-blogger Tim O'Reilly who is also a friend of Kathy Sierra. (A working draft of the code can be viewed here.)

In his initial post, O'Relly writes:

A culture is a set of shared agreements that allows us to live together. Let's make sure that the culture we create with our blogs is one that we are proud of.

I agree with this whole-heartedly, and I think the best blogs around create a very good culture by setting a positive example when they write. Robert Scoble, Garr Reynolds, Kathy Sierra, and Guy Kawasaki are all great examples of this tack. As a result, by and large, the people who participate in the micro-community developed around these blogs tend to follow the given example.

The New York Times has an overview of the potential code, and the concept has seen support and adaptation from some like David Weinberger and BlogHer (whose guidelines actually served as inspiration) while gaining some thoughtful criticism from others like Jeff Jarvis and Robert Scoble.

David Weinberger writes:

We've always been responsible for comments: There's always been a line we wouldn't allow commenters to cross, or if there's been no line, we've been responsible for that as well. But we need to be OK with setting out explicit guidelines.

On the other hand, Jeff Jarvis counters:

You either trust me and respect me based on what I say here or you do not, and there are plenty in the latter camp. Transparency and publicness are what drive that. Not some silly code and badge.

The way I see it is that Matthew 7:12 states it plainly: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Confucius said, "What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to others," and the Mahābhārata states, "This is the sum of duty; do naught unto others what you would not have them do unto you." I could really go on and on here. What we refer to as the Golden Rule has seen incarnations in several religions and cultures in varying points of history. If we try to live by this principle offline, then we should also do so online.

I don't enable comments on this site. (I don't have the time to read and respond to them at my current point in life.) My readership is more than welcome to send me a message at the email address on the About Rob page. However, even if I do enable comments in the future, I still don't think I'll adopt the O'Reilly code verbatim. There is value in anonymity as well as danger. I don't feel I own your words. However, I do expect you to engage me the way I would engage you in conversation – fairly and respectfully.

Quick Links:

• Stop Cyberbullying
• Techmeme: Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct

PS - I resent the New York Times article title. It does a little too much to equate "nasty" with "blogs" in the public mind. Also, those web badges on the O'Reilly draft are ... not pretty.

Tags: blogging, opinion

Links to other blog entries would usually go on my Links Blog, but this is too big. However, I want to warn you, this link is more graphic and disturbing than I would usually post here, so consider that before clicking:

CPUs: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

One of the scariest things about online communication is the fact that anyone can hide behind a wall of anonymity and behave in the most depraved ways their minds can imagine. For some reason, they think this is okay. However, what we say and do, anonymously or otherwise, has real effects on real people.

My thoughts are with Kathy at this time. Her blog was a major inspiration to me when I set up this site over a year ago and it continues to be. In all, this site has seen 462 entries made to its various sections during that time, but not one entry comes close to matching the material I would find on Creating Passionate Users. Her voice is an important one, and I seriously hope that a few jerks don't end up silencing that voice.

I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy with the individuals associated with the activities she mentions. Even if you are not directly involved, the actions you condone by your silence and the character of the individuals you choose to associate with speak about your true character. If you don't want people to think bad things about you, choose your preferred activities and associations accordingly.

We're all humans. Let's please treat each other that way. Kathy, I hope to see you posting again soon. Until then, I'll keep you in my prayers.

(3/27) Update 01: An individual who had founded one of the sites involved in this mess (now taken down) has posted an apology and explanation of his original intentions for said site. You can read his post right here.

(3/28) Update 02: Computerworld has an interview with Kathy Sierra regarding this situation. She sounds very discouraged but reasonable. I've linked to the Macworld version of the article because its all on one page. Macworld: Death threats force blogger to sidelines.

(3/28) Update 03: Kathy has updated her original post, closing comments. She says even more grief and abuse has come from this attention, and now personal information of hers has been leaked onto the 'net by anonymous sources. This is truly tragic.

(4/2) Last Update: I promise I'm ready to move on now. Just two more links:
• Kathy Sierra: Update/Joint Statement with Chris Locke

• Chris Locke: Coordinated Statements on the Recent Events

Tags: opinion, blogging

Unsanity's products always seem to spark debate in the Mac web-sphere. From some of the more vocal members of the development team to the rather roundabout ways their products interact with Mac OS X, they are a company that polarizes the community surrounding them. Negative attention is turning toward the company again as Apple is making it clear in their developer's mailing list that they officially do not support systems on which Unsanity's Application Enhancer is installed.

George Warner:

Our (Apple's) official policy is that we don't support APE'd systems. Period. The data miner that parses all the crash logs that are sent to us automatically ignores any report that has APE api's in the backtraces or dylb lists.

Likewise If DTS receives a crash incident with API in the backtrace or dylb list we will not investigate it. Our "standard answer" in this case is to inform the developer that we don't support APE and that we'll only be able to help them if they can reproduce the problem without APE installed.

The simple fact is that APE works some strange mojo on your Mac to do its magic, and some users resent that. Others point to serious problems APE can cause on systems. Just search for "Application Enhancer" or "APE" on the MacNN forums for a good idea of what I'm talking about.

Regardless of the risks, I have to admit to being an Unsanity customer since the early days of my Mac OS X adoption. I can hardly remember what it was like using OS X without APE installed and a couple of its companion products (called "haxies"). I have registered four of Unsanity's haxies, but I only actively use two. One product is ShapeShifter, a theming utility for OS X, and the other is FruitMenu – the utility that keeps me coming back.

After transitioning to an Intel Mac, Unsanity's haxies were seriously slowing my system down, among other factors, and I ended up removing them and the APE module from my system. No buyer's-remorse was involved. I had gotten years of use out of the products and was perfectly okay with leaving them behind. However, once Mac OS X 10.4.9 was released, allowing for a more efficient version of APE to be released, I found myself reinstalling these utilities primarily for a single feature of FruitMenu. Allow me to illustrate.

If I'm working on a project for work or this site, I typically have several applications open at once, and I'll cmd-Tab between them as needed. I imagine you might have a similar workflow. Unfortunately, look what happens to the menus as applications change:

Menu headers jump around based on the length of the application's name. This is most noticeable with the File and Edit menus, which appear in nearly all windowed applications. This means if you are a clicker (like me), there is a moving target on top of the screen, especially in the case of Word in this illustration.

FruitMenu has an option in its Preference Pane to use applications' icons to denote the application menu in lieu of the programs' names. Take a look at how this alters the menu bar:

Now the menus remain much more static, thus improving the overall usability of the menu bar. The File and Edit menus stay exactly consistent. Some might raise the concern that it is not ideal UI design to use an icon for a menu because it is not immediately apparent that the icon is a clickable item. However, I would say Mac users are used to icon-activated menus due to the Apple menu in the left-hand corner and the various other menu extras that appear to the right (not pictured). I personally think that the usability gains granted by turning the application menu into an icon trump the negatives.

In short, this feature keeps bringing me back to Unsanity's APE modules. It really surprises me that this behavior isn't the Mac OS X default, and FruitMenu will stay on my system as long as it performs reliably. Between the release of 10.4.9 and Unsanity's resolution of APE's pre-binding issue, I perceive no performance lags on my modded system, so I guess I'm okay with some system mojo happening just as long as everything is sailing smoothly and I get to have my Menu bar the way I like it.

Tags: software, opinion, os x

This weekend, Ars Technica posted a debate between two of its writers regarding the price of the PlayStation 3. Both sides make good points about the PS3 and its current investment-versus-return ratio.


Frank, speaking for price cuts:

"There's no question that on paper and in reality the PS3 is a good piece of tech with lots of capabilites that appeal to the technologically-inclined like us. But that's not good enough. The reality of the industry is that you can't just appeal to the hardcore techies and audio/videophiles. You need as wide an audience as possible."

"Every time I'm at EB there's always people playing the PS3, but they always walk away saying the same thing: 'I'd get it if it weren't so expensive; once the price comes down, I'll probably buy one.'"

Ben, asserting that the price is fine as-is:

"If you're an audio- or videophile the PS3 is a ridiculous value already. With Blu-ray players priced around $1,000, the PS3 is a a great half-price Blu-ray player where you basically get the gaming functionality for free. Or you can look at it as only $100 more than the 360 and you get a great next-gen movie player. Does the system need a price drop? No, I think the extras are worth the $100 upgrade from the price of the 360."

"Sony would be silly to slash the price now; it would be an admission of failure. The truth is we're not even done with the first round of this console war, and Sony is a powerful contender even at $500."

I agree that $500+ does contribute to a great deal of sticker shock. It's hard to feel justified putting down that much cash on what is essentially a game machine, and the $600 system is really out of the question as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, at $500, the PS3 is a very reasonable Blu-Ray player. Other BD players I've seen in stores have cost in the region of $1000. Unfortunately, without the proper home theater system already in place to take advantage of the technological wizardry of the PS3, the value begins to drop sharply.

Regardless of perceived value, I think there is one other large factor involved when debating the price of the PS3: Can Sony afford to cut its price? Does it make good financial sense? Right now, Sony is losing roughly $300 on every $500 system sold and roughly $240 on every $600 system sold. Assuming sales of each are equal (which is probably an incorrect assumption but makes the math easier), Sonly is losing an average of $270 per PlayStation 3 sold. Compare this to about $125 loss for each XBox 360 sold and the fact that every Wii sold is actually profitable to Nintendo.

Since launch, Sony has sold over 1 million PS3 units, averaging a net loss of about $270 million. If the PS3 sold for $100 less, then that loss would be about $100 million greater. I can hardly fathom working with numbers that big, let alone losing that much cash. If Sony sells PS3s and an absolutely steady rate, they will have 6 million sold by the end of the year, resulting in losses of over $1 billion – without a price drop.

Granted, Sony has many divisions to help offset this loss, and both Microsoft and Sony treat their consoles as loss-leaders. (Remember that the original XBox resulted in a total $4 billion net loss for Microsoft during its life-span.) However, how much loss can you take before the product becomes a greater liability than an asset? This is precisely why Nintendo has dropped out of the specification wars and have begun trying to attract customers through different approaches. Nintendo's products have to be profitable. They don't have a music division or an office suite to help with the bottom line.

I don't think we're going to see a PS3 price reduction anytime soon. Yes, it might move units, but such a move would likely do more harm to Sony's bottom line than good. What Sony needs to be doing is convincing developers to exploit BD media for all that's its worth and start convincing consumers that the PS3 is worth its price. PR and exclusive titles are going to play a big role in the perceived value of the PlayStation 3, but price cuts are out of the question until manufacturing costs can be brought under control.

Tags: video games, opinion

I wasn't planning on blogging about this, but here I go. I'm going to warn you now that this post may be quite a bit more negative than you are used to reading here.

Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, this weekend, spoke very candidly about the needs of education reform in this country. I agree with much of what they have to say, and, even though neither probably have any clue what it is, they both advocated project-based learning in many of their comments.

From the Statesman.com article:

"Dell also recalled how, as a seventh-grade student, he was fascinated by his school's teletype machine. He and Jobs said it's that sort of passion and fascination that is critical to get students engaged and do their best work."

"Simply through a deep interest in something, students will learn how to work through problems and find ways of solving them, Jobs said."

This is fantastic material, and this is also the type of stuff that no standardized test can measure. However, neither Dell nor Jobs spoke to the travesty that is standardized testing and Adequate Yearly Progress.

Where things come apart is with this statement by Jobs:

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

First off, at least in Indiana, lifetime employment is a thing of the past. Your license has to be renewed every five years if you are going to keep teaching. However, I don't have a problem with that statement. His information is just out-of-date there. My problem is with his calling out teachers unions. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of poorly implemented unions and sub-par teachers taking advantages of the security of unions, but let me tell you something you may not know about teachers: They put others before themselves.

This is the whole point of becoming a teacher. Teachers want to help others reach their potential and excel in life. They sacrifice of themselves to make sure their children are provided with what they need to learn. The type of person who will become a teacher is the type of person who will unquestioningly go above-and-beyond in making sure the learning and developmental needs of the children he or she works with are met.

"Why does this matter?" you ask. I didn't say that to merely blow my own horn. The fact is this type of person is easily exploited. School administration and politicians know what kind of people go into education. Administrators and politicians know they can get away with taking advantage of these employees because the employees, for the most part, will not retaliate in any meaningful way. Why? Because if they do, it is the children who suffer! I could easily provide numerous examples from both my wife's job and my own to support this. Unfortunately, if I get too specific, I could probably lose my job – despite our union.

Just from a financial standpoint, both my wife and I spend literally hundreds of dollars a year on our classrooms. We spend hundreds of unpaid hours doing school-related work, and all the while I've been watching my paycheck get smaller due to the imbalance between pay raises and hikes in fees like insurance. It's ridiculous how much teachers are stepped on by those running education in this country, and, without any unions in place, it could be much worse.

Unfortunately, these comments seem to be gaining some support in the tech circles they are being discussed in most. Favorite blogger of mine John Gruber says he completely agrees with Jobs, and some of the comments in this Infinite Loop post just turn my stomach:

"And, by the way, no teacher has a class with "two or three" times as many students as recommended. Classes are held to 34 students, except for very rare, and special circumstances. Then, a few more might be added."

I can't believe anyone actually thinks 30+ students is an acceptable class size. Perhaps it would be fine if every child came from a perfect family, had an average IQ, and all had similar experiences, but in reality this doesn't work. One colleague of mine has 30 students this year. A full third of them have IEPs, of those she has three or four with serious behavioral and emotional problems, specifically with aggression. She has students who are reading two grade levels above their current grade and student reading two levels below. She has kids who are very advanced in math while others have problems with simple addition and subtractions. Yet somehow, basically by herself, she has to meet all of their educational needs and get them to pass our state's standardized test next year.

"Teachers are rarely held accountable for their performance because schools don't have any particular need to excel. Jobs simply understands that a business needs to adapt and excel in order to survive. Throwing more money at schools is not a solution. We should be getting a far higher return on the investment we are already making."

Well my friend, perhaps you've never heard of an act called No Child Left Behind or, as I prefer to call it, No Teacher Left Standing. However, this person is right about the money. It shouldn't be thrown at schools. It should be thrown at teachers.

•••

In all of this, there were a couple of individuals who seemed to get it:

"That situation makes for the truly dangerous teacher: the apathetic one that only does enough to escape notice by parents and school boards, and does little but pass little Joanie to the next level. A teacher that challenges the students, truly educates them without attempting any politically motivated indoctrination, is a great teacher, but vulnerable and exposed."

Regarding "that situation," this person is speaking of all the negativity geared toward teachers from parents, administration, and politicians. Here's where apathetic teachers come from: they are the good ones who burned out.

"Steve forgot to note is that it isn't sufficient to fire bad employees. You also have to reward the good ones."

Unfortunately, the way the system is set up, the negative is much easier to focus on and react to that the positive. The entire AYP system in punitive, and that atmosphere trickles down from the politicians to the administration. This is the atmosphere that contributes to teacher burnout.

"Nearly all the problems in schools today are due to capitalistic ideals, and education should not be a contest."

Amen.

•••

When it comes down to it, unions are very necessary to the well-being of teachers. The fact is, politicians and businessmen run school systems – not educators – and they would exploit teachers for all they could if unions did not stand between them and the teachers. Right now, teachers have to play the roles of educator, moral compass, counselor, nutritionist, and sometimes therapist with our children. We have to teach the three "R"s while putting out behavioral fires and differentiating our instruction for the various ability levels in our classes. We have to appease administration and parents while trying to do what is best for the children. I can't imagine how things would deteriorate without a union there to help hold back the floodgates.

I'm all for education reform, but, just as I believe in student driven learning in the classroom, I believe education reform should be teacher-driven. No CEO, lawyer, politician, Hollywood producer, or pundit can determine what is best for the children of our country without getting into the trenches and actually teaching in a classroom for several years, and I would challenge any individual to work in a low-income school like many I've had experience with and not walk away a changed person.

Yes, there are a lot of problems with education. However, advocating the removal of the one entity that actually stands up for teachers' rights is not a solution to anything. Maybe Jobs wasn't really speaking to the actual removal of unions, but that is how a lot of people could take it, so that is the issue I decided to address.

Tags: education, opinion

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

As I wrap up these posts on NeoOffice, I can't help but be impressed by the software. Are there rough edges? Yes. Are there some usability issues that need to be resolved? Yes. However, the size and scope of this project is just impressive, especially when considering the small size of the development team and the fact that this is not commercial software – it is entirely free. Its very existence (as well as that of its parent project OpenOffice) sternly challenges the notion that we as consumers are obligated to continually pay for expensive productivity software.


Will NeoOffice supplant my normal workflow involving Keynote and Pages? Probably not. I like these two applications too much to give them up, and I will happily upgrade to the next versions of these applications whenever Apple rolls them out. On the other hand, can NeoOffice replace my Office installation? That is a more interesting question.

On my PowerMac G5, Microsoft Office outperforms NeoOffice at every turn. It's more reliable, and it is more stable. On the other hand, NeoOffice and MS Office are very comparable in terms of performance and stability on my new MacBook Pro. I still see some weird redraw issues in NeoOffice, but not near what was present on the G5. (By the way, these performance gains support my theory that the PPC version of NeoOffice is being throttled by the Java code.) The fact that I like the layout of NeoOffice's interface better than the mess of floating toolbars that is Microsoft Office 2004 is additionally helpful.

I think I'm going to try to supplant Word and PowerPoint with the NeoOffice equivalents for the next couple of months and see how things go. Those are my two most commonly used Microsoft applications, so this will grant me plenty of opportunities to grow even more familiar with NeoOffice and grow accustomed to its quirks. However, I will probably still upgrade to Office 2008 when it becomes available later this year, especially if I can still get it through the university.

As a couple of final notes, starting February 27, the NeoOffice team will begin seeding a new milestone of their product to members of their Early Access Program. One key feature of this release is support for OpenXML documents and VBA macro support. Also, the OpenOffice team is currently working on a Mac OS X native version of the original, and I'll be checking that out when it becomes available. Ideally, I think it would be great if the OpenOffice team and the NeoOffice team combined resources as opposed to creating competing free products.

By and large, I've really been getting into NeoOffice. As I learn more about coding, I will definitely look into contributing toward ways I hope the product can be improved. It amazes me that something like this can exist in an economy that has become so centered around commercial solutions and specific vendors, and I hope NeoOffice continues its development for many years to come.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

So far, my experience with NeoOffice has been a positive one, but I can't help but feel this application seems out of place in Mac OS X. Here are some points I've accumulated. Please note that some would be far easier to implement than others. In an ideal world, any of these could be achievable, but I understand that the NeoOffice team is very small, so few or none of these wishes may make future versions.

Native Interface Components

NeoOffice seems to rely on Java's cross-platform interface elements to fit into Mac OS X. As noted in the post about look-and-feel, this works – but only to a point. Some interface elements, like the close button, don't behave as they should, and many Aqua-fied Java elements just look awkward. Moving forward, it would be nice if NeoOffice began to slowly adopt an entirely Aqua native interface that fully blended into the Mac OS X environment. Right now, the interface still feels foreign despite its shiny exterior.

iLife Media Browser

This one may be harder to implement since I don't think Apple has a public API for interfacing with the iApps. Still, some programs like RapidWeaver and Swift Publisher have pulled it off. There is even a shareware application called Media Browser that gives users a universal iLife media browser. This would hopefully be a part of making NeoOffice play nicer with iPhoto and iTunes media.

Drag & Drop Improvements

I noticed many times that I tried to just drop an image into a NeoOffice document window directly from the Finder or iPhoto, the image did not appear. I had to go through the "Insert > Image > From File..." method. If you are like me and keep all images in iPhoto, this is not a fun solution at all. Hopefully, future versions will offer better drag-and-drop support.

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Drag & Drop or a media browser (like the one shown here from RapidWeaver) are both more efficient than browsing for an iPhoto image.

Modular or Not Modular

This last one is pretty big in terms of what philosophy NeoOffice is following. Right now, NeoOffice is a modular application. This means you open one application to access all of its components. This is in contrast to Microsoft Office or Apple iWork, for example, which are application suites. The programs work together, but you open the application unique to the kind of document you wish to create (presentation, spreadsheet, text document, etc.). The problem I run into with NeoOffice's modular state is that I must open a Writer document first, regardless of what I wish to create. Then I can choose a different document type from the application menu or the Dock menu.



It would be nice if, when NeoOffice is launched, a project selector of some kind would appear. I'm partial to the one that appeared when launching Appleworks 6 that gave you access to each module, your recent documents, and some templates and assistants (think wizards) by way of a series of tabs. It was clan, uncluttered, and it got the job done. If NeoOffice wants to remain modular, it really should adopt a project launcher like this. Otherwise, each module should be a separate application, making NeoOffice into an application suite instead.


AppleWorks Starting Points. Image from Wikipedia.

Conclusion

There are other things I would like to see – soft shadows, better translucency effects, better scroll-wheel support in drop-down lists (like the font menu) – but these are really some of the bigger elements that would make NeoOffice an even better experience for end users such as myself. None of these are really deal-breaker quality exclusions, but including features like these would help NeoOffice blend in even better with Mac OS X and other applications.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

In addition to Writer and Impress, NeoOffice includes modules called Calc, Draw, Math, and Base.Each of these has unique functions and adds value to the overall NeoOffice package. I am not a heavy user of these features, so I am not ready to speak to the quality of these products. This post will just let you see what they look like and what functionality they provide.

NeoOffice Calc

This is a very important component for MS Office compatibility – the spreadsheet application. Excel is used and misused in many work environments for a variety of tasks. Calc is the only Excel alternative on the Mac platform that can run macros in the spreadsheets, and when Office 2008 ships for the Macintosh, NeoOffice Calc will be the only solution for macro-embedded Excel files as the next Mac version of Office is dropping macro support. This fact alone should make Calc alluring for Macintosh business users.

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Excel & Calc side-by-side

I simply imported an Excel spreadsheet I use a lot at school to see how it works in Calc, and I'm happy to say that everything seems intact. As you can see, some of the formatting in the top cells disappeared, but that is hardly mission critical. The little I know about Excel works as expected in Calc, and I have to say that the NeoOffice alternative is much less cluttered. (As an aside, MS Office 2008 for Mac is finally ditching those annoying floating toolbars.)

Math & Base

I really can't say much about either of these as I have no experience with math and database programs. However, it is important to note that these programs fill voids in the world of Macintosh productivity suites. No Macintosh office suite ships with a database solution – not even the most expensive version of MS Office. I suppose you could count AppleWorks, but Apple doesn't really support that suite anymore as iWork is slowly assuming its place in Apple's software matrix.

Math seems to be a very straightforward equation editor, and I had little trouble figuring the application out. Base has a much steeper learning curve, but it looks similar to the limited exposure I've had to Access. Database users should be comfortable here, and the program is fairly flexible, supporting Access, MySQL, and other popular database formats.

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Math and Base in action

Draw

Many Mac users remember the drawing module that was a part of AppleWorks. Unfortunately, while Pages and Keynote have some nice drawing tools, there has not been a simple drawing application included with Macs for quite a while. While Draw was fun to use, like MS Paint on Windows, I really couldn't see myself ever using this module (although it is much more flexible than Paint).

Conclusion

NeoOffice is a very complete package. Basically every element you would expect to find in a business-class productivity suite is here, and the entire package is free. While I have some reservations about the current version of NeoOffice, the value of the suite is undeniable. There is a ton of functionality packaged here, more than is available with any single commercial Macintosh productivity package. That fact alone makes it worth downloading and trying out.

Stay tuned. For my next NeoOffice-themed post, I'll be delving into a small wish-list for the application.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

I'm going to get something out of the way right now. Subjectively, I like NeoOffie Impress better than MS PowerPoint 2004. I'm going to be critical of a few points in this post, so I just wanted to get that out of the way first. Having said that, let's move on...

Upon opening a new Impress document, I had to sigh when I saw another wizard greeting me. Fortunately, you can jump out of the Wizard by clicking "Create," and it's possible to disable this Wizard altogether in the preferences.


It looks like my work computer!

Impress has an interesting tabbed interface atop the main document window, and these tabs cycle between different views for your presentation. The choices are Normal, Outline, Notes, Handout, and Slide Sorter. Of these, I thought Notes was particularly useful because this feature could be used to create annotated slide handouts like the one's I discussed in this post.

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The Normal and Notes views


Slide Sorter view

The interface for NeoOffice impress is at once more inviting and more prohibitive than MS PowerPoint. It's more inviting in that the interface is much less cluttered than PowerPoint's. One of the more interesting ways in which this is accomplished is through toolbars that appear and disappear as they are needed. For example, if I select some text, the picture formatting toolbar is replaced by the text formatting one. Also the use of thumbnail slide's in the navigator is far superior to PowerPoint's habit of only showing the slide's text. (I know this problem is unique to the Mac version of PowerPoint.)

Unfortunately, the interface is more prohibitive in that many features are buried in subcommands and dialog boxes. Doing something so simple as changing the background color of the slide requires jumping through a few hoops, but I felt like this dialog box served to illustrate this issue best:



Yup, that's a dialog box for cropping an image. This is what you get when selecting the crop tool from the toolbar. In every other app I know, cropping (or masking) is done directly in the document window and applied to the image live. By contrast, in NeoOffice Impress, you have to manually choose the dimensions of the image. This can be much more accurate, but it is less intuitive to the average user. Fortunately, that thumbnail image previews your changes before you apply them.

My other main criticism of Impress centers around performance. It's bad. It makes my G5 feel like a G3 trying to run Unreal Tournament 2004. It is that painful at times. Dragging objects around slides always left visible screen artifacts on my machine, and I was finding myself continually minimizing and restoring the document window to minimize the clutter created by these artifacts.



Unfortunately, bringing the document window out of the dock carried its own hazards. Sometimes, it would take Impress a few minutes to redraw on the screen, and the whole application locked up once in the process of redraw.


I had to eventually Force Quit the app to escape from this.

Again, my experience tells me that the Java code in NeoOffice is the culprit here. I don't care what the theory says, in practice complex Java code runs poorly on PPC processors. If I'm correct, these performance issues practically disappear once I get a chance to test this software on an Intel-based Macintosh.

Other small quirks persist. For example, drag-and drop support for images is inconsistent at best, making the use of iPhoto images tricky (though I found copy-and-paste to be a good workaround for this). Copying and pasting elements from one slide to another does not always work, and customizing toolbars proved to be a futile task. It was easy enough to go through the customization process. The problem is that Impress would revert to the defult toolbars every few minutes.

After these criticisms, it may be hard to believe my first pragraph – that I like Impress better than PowerPoint – but it is true. At this point, Impress canot supplant PowerPoint when I need to create more PC-friendly presentations due mainly to performance issues. However, Impress just feels more thought out than PowerPoint does, and that is a great testament to the power of Open Source. One example of that really connected with me was in adding text to a formatted object or image. In PowerPoint, you have to either select the object and choose "Insert Text..." from a contextual menu, or you just create a separate text box and place it atop the image. In Impress (as in Keynote), all you have to do is double-click the object – it doesn't matter if it's a drawn shape or a photograph.

NeoOffice Impress shows great petential, but it is hampered more severely than Writer in terms of bugs and performance. If Impress were more responsive and more predictable in its image-handling, then it would easily supplant PowerPoint. As it is, NeoOffice Impress is an application I really like but can't see myself using on a daily basis.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

The record labels just never seem to give up. Time and again, they have thrown their weight around to suck as much money out of their customers as they can, completely disregarding anything that resembles decency and ethics.

RIAA's Earned Reputation

I can think of no other industry that holds its consumers in such general contempt as the recording industry (except, perhaps, the oil industry whose executives hold our very planet in contempt).

In fact, let's take a stroll down memory lane:

• Ars Technica: RIAA says CD ripping, backups not fair use
• Arts Techica: RIAA defendent argues damages are excessive
• Ars Technica: RIAA lawyers bully witnesses into perjury
• WinInfo: Microsoft caves to Universal in music deal (I might also mention that this Internet Nexus post claims Micrsosft has had to enter into similar agreements with the other music labels.)

This is but a small sampling of the RIAA and music labels stepping on others' feet, and all but one of these links is from this year! Again, the only explanation is that they hold their customers in absolute contempt.

The Latest Offense

Now, record executives aren't just being disrespectful to their source of income (read: you and me). They are now claiming too much profit is making its way to the hands of recording artists trough new avenues of distribution such as iTunes, the Zune Marketplace, and cell phone ring-tones.

The IGN article states it well:

"At best the RIAA is kicking artists when they're down via this action, and at worst has fully revealed that despite repeated claims that artists need to be protected from piracy, the organization is very much the tool of the major labels and publishers who have famously never really cared about the artists in the first place."

Growing Irrelevancy

Middlemen – that is all the record labels are. They are to music what Dunder Mifflin is to paper. They take stuff others created, package it up, overcharge for it, and then take the lion's share of profit for themselves. Again, except for the oil industry, can you think of another industry so willing to alienate all around them for the sake of profits?

Unfortunately, the record labels are slowly becoming irrelevant, and they know it. However, instead of evolving with the times and redefining their roles in the marketplace, the big labels are merely throwing their collective weight around, trying to cash in on as much as they can before the axe falls.

What would be great is if major online music retailers like Yahoo! Music, iTunes, Urge, and Zune Marketplace would allow artists to submit tracks and albums directly, bypassing the publishers entirely. The problem with this, of course, is that the artists still rely on the music labels to provide studios and equipment to record with. Also, the studios often own the copyright to an artists work rather than the artist him-/herself, and there may be no quick solution for these issue.

Regardless, the RIAA has become a dinosaur that has become both carnivorous and cannibalistic in its attempts to maintain a stranglehold on its profits. These executive don't care about the artists they represent, nor do they care about the consumers that purchase their product. If the record labels and the RIAA continue their reign of terror, it won't be long until artists and consumers start looking for ways to eliminate them from the equation entirely.

Tags: riaa, opinion

Final Fantasy XII is turning out to be a very enjoyable game. I don't play a lot of them, but when I do, I really get into playing console RPGs. I've played most of the Final Fantasies, the Dragon Quests available in the US, some Xenosaga, Dark Cloud, and a smattering of other titles. Usually these are engaging, thought-provoking, and rewarding experiences – but fun? That's what I have We Love Katamari and Burnout Revenge for! Anyway, here are some aspects of FFXII that bump up the enjoyment factor:

The Battles. Simply put, the battle system is great. The battles flow well, and they do not feel near as random as in previous installments. To get Licensing Points, you have to fight tons of enemies – each worth only one LP. In fact, Licensing Points are very similar to Ability Points in other series entries like FFX-2 and FFV, but they don't feel near as tedious to accumulate thanks largely to the battle system.


Image from Wikipedia

The Licensing Board. The Licensing Board is similar to the sphere grid in FFX but with tons more versatility. I'm loving filling out the board and creating black mage-ninja-warriors and other combinations. In fact, I've probably spent more time filling out the Licensing Board than I have been following the plot!

The Art Direction. FFXII is a beautiful game. Characters, environments, and enemies all look fantastic. The look and feel of the game has been very consistent so far, and everything works together to make the world seem all the more epic and grand.

Exploring. Even though FFXII is every bit as plot-driven as its predecessors, I don't feel near as tied down to a specific area or course of action. Many areas open up quickly (even regions where death is guaranteed), and you can walk away from many missions to explore surrounding areas for hours. Regions are connected fairly seamlessly, and you get a terrific sense of distance while you are traveling across the lands.

The Command Screen. Basic commands can be brought up at any time with a tap of the "X" button, and (greatest of all) you can drop into the menu screen at any time, even during battles, and change members or equipment with no turn penalty. I always hate it when you lose a turn for changing swords in the middle of a fight. (I'm looking at you FFX.)

The Settings and Characters. This game feels epic and fantastic at every turn, even with its smaller-scale plot. No summoners turned pop divas; no airborne castles; no soldiers singing arias; and no sports stars turned warriors. So far, every character and location feels consistent with the tone of the game, and all of the characters' actions harmonize with who they are. Even Moogles seem noble, and that has to count for something.

For fear of sounding like a fanboy, I think this is the best Final Fantasy I've played since FFIV. This game is hard to put down, and anyone with a PS2 really should give Final Fantasy XII a try. If you're not big into RPGs, rent it, but I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Reading up on this game before it came out, I was worried how I would like it. Now that I've been playing it for 40 hours (with tons to go), I'm hooked!

Tags: video games, opinion

Okay, the title sounds epic in proportion, but this post will be far from profound. I'm just musing here on the Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 in context of the tech-giddiness you all know I suffer from and which console(s) I'm most likely to spend my hard-earned cash on.


Of course, I wouldn't be fair if I didn't consider Microsoft's established player in this field – the XBox 360. Many things, from its design to the well-implemented online service, impress me about the XBox 360. Price-wise, it's middle of the road. However, to play next-generation movies on the console, an additional $200 purchase is necessary. The real problem with the XBox 360 is that none of the games particularly excite me. Gears of War and Halo 3 do look very nice as does Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Unfortunately, shooters have lost much of their appeal for me, and Oblivion is not exclusive. I like the 360. I just don't $400 like it.


On the downside, the PS3 is really expensive. Fortunately, I could see myself settling for the base model with no qualms, so that trims $100 off the investment. Still, can I see myself plunking $500 down for one of these? In a word, no. However, the PS3 will be home to new installments in the Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank, and Metal Gear Solid series – franchises I am near fanatical about. Add these to the eventual release of a new Burnout title (which will also be available for XBox 360), and Sony's gaming machine looks tempting.

The tipping point could be Final Fantasy XIII, but that may not be out for a while. If I do get a PS3, it won't be until two things happen. First, its library of games that really interest me grows, and, second, the price comes down a bit.


The wild-card of the new consoles is the Nintendo Wii, and I'm going to spoil the ending by saying I am most immediately interested with this product. Between the 62 physical and virtual titles to be released by the end of the year, I see quite a few interesting leads – including a new Zelda game on launch day. Also, at $250, the Wii is much less of a hit on the wallet, and it even comes with a game, meaning I'm not obligated to shell out an additional $50-$60 to make use of my shiny new console.

The big drawback with the Wii is the lack of HD resolutions. However, all we have is a standard definition TV in our house, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, so the lack of HD is a non-issue at the moment. Still, I want to actually try this machine out before making any decisions.

All the same, I'm getting a lot of use out of our GameCube and PS2, so I feel no rush to buy any of these. Last generation, we didn't pick up a PS2 until Final Fantasy X was out, and the GameCube was acquired an entire year after that. Still, there is a very good chance that when we do get a new console, the Wii will sit at the top of the list, and I promise to post unpacking pictures and impressions whenever we get around to buying one!

Tags: video games, opinion

I can't say I've ever felt the need to enter into the realm of blog rebuttal before, but this article absolutely takes the cake. In many cases, I don't agree with anti-Mac articles, but I can, at least, see where the writer is coming from. In this case, Larry Bodine of Law.com writes an article that is so off-base and full of misinformation I just can't resist.

In the first paragraph, he claims to have purchased a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.7 GHz model. Then he tells the world how terrible it was to use his Mac.

I was suckered in by the hype about freedom from viruses, simplicity of computing and versatility. Instead, I bought a boat anchor that can't view Web sites properly, is not compatible with Microsoft Word and can run only dumbed-down versions of regular software.

Mr. Bodine makes four claims in this paragraph.

• "I was suckered." Twice in the article, Mr. Bodine talks about the enticement of a virus-free computer. However, nowhere does he clarify whether or not this is the case. The way he words his sentences makes it sound as if Macs are prone to viruses and spyware, which they are not. Intentionally or not, the author is being very misleading.
  
  
• "[It] can't view websites properly." Mr. Bodine gives no examples to back this claim up. Currently, I have 65 websites bookmarked. Some examples are IGN, Ars Technica, Homestar Runner, Fifth Third Bank, IUPUI Angel, IUPUI Oncourse, IUPUI OneStart, Flickr, and many others. Every one of these sites functions perfectly well in Safari. Admitedly, eBible.com has crashed Safari a couple of times, and I use Camino for that site.
  
  
• "[It] is not compatible with Microsoft Word." I have Microsoft Word on my PowerMac. As a matter of fact, so does he as he writes about his frustrations with Word later on. I don't know what he means with this claim.
  
  
• "[It] can only run dumbed-down versions of regular software." How do you define "regular" software, Mr. Bodine? Macs can run Adobe Creative Suite CS2, Final Cut Studio, Shake, Microsoft Office, Filemaker, Sibelius, Aperture, Dreamweaver, and many more. How are any of these "dumbed-down" products?

This article is shaky from the get-go, but it only gets worse the further you read:

"I'll be lucky to get half of the $4,552.71 I paid for the Mac on May 21, 2006."

You paid what? When? For which model? The lineup this Mac was a part of was replaced in October 2005. Granted, it remained purchasable on the Apple Store for some time after that due to the PCI-X compatibility issue, but the price is another problem. New, one of these retailed for $2,999 sans screen. I'll grant, a monitor purchase might have been necessary, but how much did this guy splurge? Money management must not be a forte because in May 2006, he could have gotten a more powerful quad-core G5 for less.

Edit: Since his original article, Mr. Bodine has corrected himself and stated he bought the Mac in July of 2005. How you make a mistake like that is beyond me, but I'll take his word for it.

"I was encouraged to make the switch by artists, ad agency employees and junior high school kids, even though I don't really create graphics, listen to iTunes or make movies."

So you bought a computer because it's popular in a line of work you're not involved in and because teenagers told you to. Tell me, do these teens speak to you often? Do you follow this rationale when buying things like cars? If I listened to my students' advice, I would be wearing faux gold chains, collecting Bratz dolls, trading Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and avoiding showers for days at a time.

"The signs of doom were there on day one, but I ignored them. I pretended that I liked the one button mouse. I quickly started using click + command keys (and other keyboard shortcuts). I really missed the little scrolling wheel in the center of the mouse."

Again with the dates. Yes, the one-button mouse was a hold-off for years, but it was dumped in October 2005. Apple now ships a four-button mouse that does have a scroll wheel with all of its desktops and workstations. Even if this Mr. Bodine did get the one-button Apple Mouse, he spent $4,500 on his rig and can't go buy a $20 optical mouse to plug in. (Incidentally, my Kensington mouse has four buttons, a scroll wheel, cost $20, and "just works" when plugged in.)

"I noticed it was slow; I saw that stupid spinning colored wheel a lot. The Mac would hang up; the TV ads said Macs didn't do that."

I see the beach ball occasionally too, but not often. I can still count the number of "hang ups" my PowerMac has had on one hand (even after about three years), and most of them are iDVD-related. I'm sorry his exponentially more powerful machine was so much slower than mine is. I guess mileage may vary.

"What drove me nuts was that I would open Word for Mac and couldn't delete files while I was in Word. There is no File | Delete option. So the documents took up space on my hard drive, until someone told me I had to find the document in Finder and then move it into the trash from there. This seemed stupid to me; I just wanted to highlight a file and tap 'delete.'"

This is true. you cannot delete files from within a Mac OS X save dialog, and MS Word uses a standard Mac save dialog. This problem is just a fundamental difference in design. Unfortunately, I've noticed that a few Windows users get frustrated on Macs because, on Windows, you can add and remove files and programs with absolutely no understanding of how your system is organized. The Mac Finder is organized very well, but too many people don't even know to use it if they have grown used to Windows' hand-holding.

"Word files transferred from the Mac were missing pictures. PowerPoint files transferred from the Mac would lose their formatting. PCs and Macs are not compatible, regardless of what they say."

This also happens PC-to-PC if the machines are running different versions or editions of Office. Personally, this has never bitten me, but I use Office only minimally.

"Things I could do with a PC in two keystrokes took four or five clicks with the Mac. To do a "fast print" required clicking File, Print, find Copies & Pages, click Paper Type/Quality, click Normal and finally clicking Fast Draft."

Like the Windows version of Office, there is an icon of a printer in the main toolbar. Click it, and the printer spits out your document – one click, not five.

"Doing a simple screen capture was an immense chore. On a PC you just press Alt and tap PrtScr. With the Mac I had to download and launch special programs to accomplish this simple task."

Cmd-Shift-3 captures the entire screen. Cmd-Shift-4 allows you to select a certain area to be captured. Press the space bar, and you can highlight specific elements such as an active window, the dock, or the menu bar. No third-party utility is required.

"I didn't even bother with the Mac's iCal or Mail, which required me to buy an @mac.com address. Instead, I went straight to Outlook for Mac."

Neither iCal nor Mail require .Mac accounts to function properly. It's a shame he left these alone. They are nice applications. (Microsoft is even imitating iCal in Windows Vista.) Mail's handling of junk mail is really quite good, and I like the option of bouncing messages I don't want. I get almost no spam anymore.

"For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser."

Really? In the last 48-hours, I have visited Adobe.com, Ugo Player.com, Homestar Runner.com, and YouTube.com. All of these sites use Flash, and all of these sites look just fine in Safari. I wonder if Mr. Bodine checked to see if the Flash plug-in was installed. After all, even Internet Explorer won't work with Flash sites if the plug-in is not there.

"I even called Apple headquarters and asked when a better version would be available and was told that Apple is in no hurry to improve it."

I don't believe this for a second. First, he may be misrepresenting Apple's usual "we don't comment on future products" reply. Second, there are various enhancements for Safari planned for Leopard. Third, this blog provides very open information about WebKit (Safari's foundation) and it's development.

"On the suggestions of friends, I downloaded Netscape and Firefox, which were no better."

I have no comment on Netscape, but I'll let the Open Source crowd address him in regards to Firefox.

There is more to the article, but this really gives a decent representation of his flawed reasoning. The fact is, Mr. Bodine makes some claims that are sometimes outright wrong and others with no corroborating evidence. Despite his law degree and position as a tech advisor he seems lacking in basic fact-checking and computing skills. I doubt he really is, but this article makes him seem that way. I've even read one blogger that feels Mr. Bodine just made up his whole experience for the sake of traffic. I don't believe he's outright lying, but his way of telling the truth is not terribly honest-sounding.

I'm very glad many Mac users have offered to help make Mr. Bodin'e life easier, but I wish he would correct his article for integrity's sake. I don't care if he likes his Mac, but if he is going to advise people to avoid Macs, he should do so for legitimate reasons.

Tags: opinion

Usually, I would just stick something like this in my Links Blog, but this one actually makes me want to jump up on a soapbox.
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A new HP camera is actually being marketed with the idea that it can slim the subject of the photograph. Yes, friends, if you think your significant other is just too heavy looking in a shot on your vacation, no problem! Merely adjust a slider, and you can help him or her virtually shed unnecessary pounds! Here are some shots of it in action (straight off HP's site):





Now let's take some notes:

• The models on HP's site are only females – talk about gender stereotyping.
• The models look fine as they are. HP marketing is essentially saying healthy-looking women are in need of slimming, so you must be too.
• Can we talk about social pressures regarding anorexia at this point?

I may be a bit harsh here (which, you have to admit, is very unusual for me), but this whole concept is being promoted in a very irresponsible way. "You are not good enough. You look fat on film. Let us fix you." I can admit that, by and large, many Americans are overweight. Even I'm not as fit as I could be, but is this how we need to solve the problem? Are we so incapable of caring for ourselves that we need to artificially create better selves? I hope not.

Stuff like this just boggles me. All this really does is vertically stretch the entire picture, but it just makes me a little sick-to-the-stomach that somewhere another boardroom has made a decision that only further exploits weight insecurities (specifically in women) at both extremes. I no boycotter, but when we get a digital camera, I doubt it will be a HP right now.


Also, Jason Fried of 37 Signals has made a post about this "feature."

Tags: opinion, technology, software

Apple's event on Tuesday brought about an updated iTunes application among other announcements. Historically, iTunes has foreshadowed future trends in Apple's GUI from the brushed metal appearance of iTunes 1.0 to the darker unified look of iTunes 5, so I thought the new iTunes was worth a look.
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First up, I couldn't help but notice (as have many others) that the icon returns to the blue of iTunes 2, but the beam connecting the eighth notes is thicker than in previous versions of this icon. I'm glad blue is back. It was my favorite iTunes icon!
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Now right here is a shot of iTunes 6 & iTunes 7 side-by-side. (You can click these images for a larger view.)



Immediately, it is noticeable that iTunes 7 sports a much more subdued interface. Colors in general are muted, and it doesn't even use standard aqua scroll-bars and checkboxes. Also, some elements have been moved around, but it didn't take me too long to find everything (except the Visualizer button seems to be entirely gone).

The sidebar sports more defined categories than did iTunes 6. The headers (oddly) are in all caps, but they do a nice job separating built-in libraries from online elements and user-created playlists. Overall, the sidebar looks much cleaner than before.

Also new are some buttons that control how you are viewing your media. The first button is the classic iTunes list view; the second button shows a list with album art, and the third button is the new Cover Flow view (in which Apple did the "right thing" and bought out the developer who inspired them).

Below is a shot of the new Cover Flow view. It's a very nice way to view your album art, but I have noticed it can be a little glitchy when browsing too quickly.



On the store side of things, movie downloads and games are new features. So far, only Disney-owned studios are available for purchase, but that still makes for a devent variety of films to choose from. I'm not thrilled with the movie prices, but they aren't bad either. Here's a look at the movie section of the store:



As you can see, Apple implements the new Cover Flow view into the movie store. This is also true of the TV store, but the music store hasn't adopted this look yet. I found browsing through the movies and watching trailers rather painless, but I haven't purchased a movie, nor do I foresee myself doing so in the near future. In thruth, I don't understand all the excitement surrounding video downloads, but I'm not much of a TV-watcher or movie-goer as it is.

Here's the new game section of the store:



The addition of this section, I have to admit, was surprising to me. I had heard rumors about Apple hiring and contacting game developers, and iPod related games seemed a natural progression. I guess I just didn't figure they would start selling them through the iTunes Store. It is a pretty convenient way to make sure iTunes can manage all things iPod.

I've been using iTunes 7 for a couple of days now with no real problems. The only glitch I have run into is the fact that Cover Flow sometimes uses placeholders instead of album art if I scroll too quickly. Otherwise, this is a great update. I love the new view options (even if one does seem directly copied from Windows Media Player 11), and everything else seems to be pretty well polished.

As I said earlier, iTunes often seems to preview future trends in Mac OS GU, and I admit that I hope this continues. By and large, I like the direction iTunes is going with its UI. The muted colors and subtle gradients work, and I even find myself drawn to those "fuzzy" scroll-bars. The only thing about iTunes 7's interface that bugs me is how strongly it contrasts with the rest of Mac OS X. Hopefully, the rest of the Mac OS experience will continue to follow iTune's lead.


By the way, Paul Thurrott has uploaded a nice gallery of iTunes' new iPod interface. You can take a look at it right here. (Wow, I never thought I'd link him twice in one day.)

Tags: software, opinion

Not more than a couple of days after I learn about Monaco, I see this little entry on M-Dollar about Windows Live Product Search and Academic Search, and I've come to a conclusion. I don't think Microsoft purposefully sets out to be the big imitator it comes off looking like. I think this "me too" image is purely the result of not knowing when to say, "enough is enough."

For the past decade (give or take), Microsoft has basically owned the operating systems market. Atop that, they dominate the market for office productivity. These two markets are highly lucrative, but it doesn't stop there.

• The Internet becomes popular. Browsers begin to emerge, and, after a few years of watching, Microsoft decides it wants to own the browser market and releases Internet Explorer. Of course, for the best web experience, websites should be optimized for IE. Sure, it may damage how they render in other browsers, but that's just collateral damage.
  
  
• Microsoft wakes up one day and notices that game consoles have been popular for the last twenty years. Perhaps it's time to jump into that market and try to dominate it with the One Development Platform to Rule Them All (which only works with Windows-based PCs and XBox, but you didn't want to develop for anything else). However, Microsoft did get online console gaming right.
  
  
• Security seems like a growing market on PCs. After all, active viruses are only a small problem (and this list doesn't even count trojans as far as I can tell). Microsoft notices a couple of companies are making money selling security software, so they decide that they will try to own that market as well with OneCare.
  
  
• Digital music seems to be doing well. There are quite a few retailers of digital music, and many of them require Windows Media Player. This seems to Microsoft like a great market to jump in and try to dominate as well.
  
  
• Companies like Google and Yahoo do well with the search market. In fact, Microsoft has already been overtaken in the initial round of the search engine battles. Does this deter Redmond? No. Defeat merely serves to infuriate the giant.

Is this list comprehensive? It is not even close, but it does serve to illustrate how Microsoft comes off as a copier. In each of these instances, Microsoft was late to the market. In fact, the market was well established before the Redmond Giant lumbered in. They can't sit back and allow other companies to fulfill the various niches the technology market allows. Microsoft seems to feel it has some Manifest Destiny to dominate in each and every sector of the market. As a result, Microsoft has to play catch-up with the products already available to consumers, and feature replication (a la Froogle) becomes inevitable. In the end, Microsoft looks like a bully, and their "innovative" features are just variations on what is already available. Hence, "Redmond, start your photocopiers."

Tags: opinion, microsoft, software

As watermarked, this photo is from MacMinute.com.

You know, back in 2004, when Apple unveiled this poster and others like it at its World Wide Developers Conference, it seemed like a pretty snarky thing to do. Despite the snide approach, many Mac users would say it rings true. Even some Windows users attest to it:

"If you're familiar with iCal, you know all you need to know about Windows Calendar."

"...just know that a DVD movie making application, similar to Apple's iDVD, is on the way."

--Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for WIndows December Vista Preview 2.

Still, some of Microsoft's moves seem logical at the time. For example, Outlook will not be shipping with the Home & Student edition of Office 2007, so bundling a simple Calendar application with Vista makes sense. Microsoft Movie Maker (a blatant rip-off of iMovie) is already offered for XP. Adding a DVD creator is the next logical step. Okay, it would have been a logical simultaneous step, but we're talking about Microsoft here, and slow progress is expected.

In truth, up until now, I was never much of a "Microsoft copies Apple" screamer. I mean, really:

• Adding a nicer interface and finally making use of graphics cards just makes sense even though OS X has been concentrating on this aspect for a while now.
  
  
• Yes, Safari beat Internet Explorer to RSS support, but I believe Firefox had RSS even before Safari.
  
  
• Yes, Apple had iTunes before Microsoft added a store to Windows Media Player, but they could've gotten that idea from anyone.
  
  
• Sure, Vista gadgets look like a Windows version of Apple's Dashboard, but Konfabulator and Desktop X were doing this first.
  
  
• Yeah, Apple supported drag-and-drop positively years before Microsoft did, but isn't drag-and-drop a natural evolution of GUI?
  
  
• Sorry, Windows had Fast User Switching before OS X.

Yes, Apple has beaten Microsoft to the punch with many things we now take for granted, but the tables have been turned from time to time. It is not a foregone conclusion that Microsoft just sits back and waits to see what Apple does so they can copy it. At least, that's what I thought.

Then I came along this – a project codenamed Monaco. I'm sorry, but how blatant and cheap is that? Let's see. Apple fulfills a niche market by offering GarageBand to its users through iLife, and Microsoft says, "Hey, they have a toy we don't! Let's do it too." It's not enough that there are plenty of third-party music sequencers for Windows. No, it seems that because Apple is making the product and bundling it with their computers (effectively making it seem like part of the OS), Microsoft absolutely has to do the exact same thing.

This is just sad. Redmond, start your photocopiers indeed.

Tags: software, microsoft, opinion, wwdc

Wow. Just wow. Things must be really cold right here at the moment. Thanks to Boot Camp (have to love Apple product names, even the temporary ones), Intel Macs can now dual-boot Mac OS X and WIndows XP.

I have to admit to not knowing what to think of this. On one hand, this could generate a lot of consumer interest in the Macintosh as switching is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. Furthermore, this could be great for the education sector. Think about it; you can now teach about all of the major operating platforms on one machine.

On the other hand, I remember talking once to a developer who thought creating a Mac port of her product was a waste of time because Mac users could always pay for a copy of Virtual PC + Windows to run her software really slowly, and that solution was good enough. This move could potentially encourage some developers to get really lazy. "You want to use our software? Just dual-boot."

Should Apple be able to retain the developers, this could be a good move. As I earlier mentioned, this could entice people who might otherwise view purchasing a Mac as a risky investment.

Despite the weirdness of this announcement, you have to love some of the barbs Apple dishes out to Microsoft on the Boot Camp product page:

On BIOS & EFI:

"Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries."

On Security:

"Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes."

(Actually, I would avoid the internet with the Windows partition as much as possible!)

In the end, in case you can't tell, I really don't know what to make of this announcement. The thought of running Windows on a Mac makes me want to wash my brain out with soap, but I can understand the appeal to others. I just hope the major Mac-supporting developers stay on board, and I hope the smaller developers like Delicious Monster, RealMac Software, Panic, and the Omni Group continue to make their awesome Mac-only products that help make this platform unique.

I guess I, like many others, will just have to sit back and see where this goes.

Update 4/6:
A favorite blogger of mine, John Gruber posted this interesting write-up on what this whole Boot Camp thing means for the Mac. The article is called, "Windows: The New Classic." (Warning: language.) Toward the end of the article, he makes an interesting observation about the Boot Camp icon (which seems spot on), and he includes one of my favorite recent geek jokes in the article as well:

"What's the difference between OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about OS X..."

Additionally, I mentioned the potential for the Boot Camp solution in the classroom. Actually, this looks like a much more interesting solution for multiple platform environments.

Tags: software, microsoft, opinion, os x

Screenshots of a new build of Windows Vista (formerly known as Windows Longhorn) appeared on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows a few days ago. Being the desktop voyeur I am, I couldn't help but pop over and ogle the screens for a while. For reference, here are links to his screenshots: Installation; Desktop, My Computer, and Network; Control Panel and Aero Glass Customization; and Applications.

Once I started to delve into the screenshots a couple of things struck me.

• Translucency and text can work. If you look at the screens, you will notice that translucency is subdued behind areas that need text, like the Start Menu and location and search fields. In the case of window contents, translucency is completely eliminated, and that looks almost out of place in Vista. Translucent elements are prevalent in Vista, but they are implemented in a fairly nice manner.
  
  
• What did they do to the Start Menu? The Start Menu has been receiving tweaks pretty much since its first appearance. Now they have removed "Start" from the icon that activates the window, and have made the icon into a sphere that awkwardly protrudes from the task bar. This protrusion carries over to the user icon atop the Star Menu (when active). The user icon proudly protrudes from the top of the menu like some royal crest. Let's hope they kill this whole icon protrusion thing before people come to accept it.
  
  
• Outlook Express has become Windows Mail. Alright, call this Apple copying if you must, but I feel the name change is logical and welcome. "Outlook Express" tells you nothing of the application's function unless you use Outlook in your workplace. "Windows Mail" is a much more user-friendly name, and it's nice to see this change.

Overall, Windows Vista seems to be coming along well. Installation is still an ugly process (visually), but I'm sure that will be cleaned up before the public release. After all, installation gives users the first impression of your system. I can't say I've ever been a fan of Microsoft's default user interface for any of its versions of Windows. (I was a user back in the days of Windows 95 and Windows 98.) However, Vista seems to be gaining a nice sheen previously absent from Windows.
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Unfortunately, my mind keeps going back to Whistler. This was a nice evolution of the Windows interface that eventually transformed into the eyesore that is Windows XP. (Oddly enough, both Mac and Windows themers have created themes based on this visual style that never made it into a publicly available version of Windows.) Hopefully, Microsoft will keep these nice touches that are present in current builds of Vista and refine them rather than pulling out something completely different at the last minute. Windows XP is not nice to look at. Vista is, and I hope it stays that way.

Tags: microsoft, technology, software, opinion

"Did you get an XBox 360 yet?" That question (or a similar variation) has hit me upside the head at least ten times in the last week. It's not so much that my friends and family care that much about games. They don't, but they know I'm avid. However, they seem a little surprised when I answer that I have not, in fact, acquired an XBox 360 as of yet. Furthermore, holiday money probably will not go toward an XBox 360 either. Why? Because, when it comes to something as permanent as a game console, I prefer to wait a while before diving in.

With something like Mac OS X, I enjoyed being an early adopter. I was able to install the public beta on a machine that was not mission critical, and I knew Apple would correct any serious flaws with time. Granted, the Finder is still a pretty big flaw in and of itself, but most others have been ironed out. Furthermore, in the case of a computer operating system, many third party solutions crop up to enhance the user experience and fill in the holes. Most of these can be applied at little risk.

A console, on the other hand, is less flexible. If the unit I purchase has flaws that are corrected a few months later, guess what? Those corrections will most likely not apply to my console. As far as fixes go, if it's a hardware fix and you mess up, your warranty is voided, and you are out a console. I've had to replace a PS2 because of a faulty optical drive, and my brother-in-law's XBox had a power supply burn. There's no deleting a .plist file or downloading a patch to correct those problems.

So what about the XBox 360 concerns me at the moment? Well, first of all, there have been less than glowing reports of its DVD playback capabilities. Furthermore, some reports of freezing systems are going around (seemingly related to an overheating power supply), and Quake 4, one of the reasons I want an XBox 360, has been criticized for framerate issues. Now I know, the framerate issue could be conceivably corrected with a downloadable patch. Hopefully, Raven will do the right thing, and work toward such a correction.

A final issue I have is with the whole hard drive issue. I'm sorry, but $100 for a 20 GB hard drive? What a rip off! The 120 GB second hard drive in my PowerMac was right around $100. Also, those who buy an XBox 360 w/HDD will surely outgrow the hard drive quickly. What solutions are there available for transferring the data from one XBox hard drive to another? Again, only time will tell how these issues will be handled.

Right now, we are a two-console home. We have a PS2 and a GameCube. Right now, a Nintendo Revolution is almost a given because we are both Nintendo fans. So the battle will be between the PS3 and the XBox 360 at to who gets to occupy our TV's second AV input, and that brings me to the most important reason for waiting: I want something to compare the XBox 360 with. Other issues aside, I don't see myself rushing out to buy a 360 without being able to objectively compare it to the competition.

No, I have not purchased an XBox 360, nor do I have any plans to in the foreseeable future. Anyway, there are still plenty of GameCube and PS2 games to keep me occupied. I haven't even started Dragon Quest VIII or the most recent installments of my beloved Ratchet and Jak series! Call me around E3 2006. By then I might be getting worked up over this whole next-gen thing.

Tags: video games, opinion

I promised this post months ago, but I just haven't had the time to hash it out. Now seems as good of a time as ever since at least one of my grad classes is mostly caught up for the moment! This is by no means a comprehensive review of Mac OS X 10.4, but I hope it provides a decent overview and a good perspective on one person's experiences using this product.
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Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released on April 29, 2005 to wide acclaim and wide criticism. As per Apple's recent tradition, the product was $129 ($69 for educators). There was much ado over "200 New Features" from Apple's PR, and there was general complaint and mockery regarding a $129 fee for a "point release" from the critical. The truth of Tiger is somewhere in the middle. You have to pick some pretty fine nits to find "200 New Features." On the other hand, Mac OS 10.4 is more than a general "point release."
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An OS By Any Other Name...

I've often said that Apple sells itself short in the nomenclature used for it's "X" systems. To illustrate this, some history:
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(At this point, some of my more tech-savy readers should skip ahead.) Mac OS X, pronounced "Mac Oh-Es Ten," is not really the tenth version of the Macintosh Operating System. The original Mac OS died with the passing of Mac OS 9. The current system is based on UNIX, and it is a marriage, sometimes inelegant and sometimes uncomfortable, of the Classic Mac OS and another OS project that was called NeXTSTEP. As such, Mac OS X 10.1 was really version one of a new product. (No, I refuse to count Mac OS X 10.0 as anything else than an expensive beta.)
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With each successive release, this product has matured considerably, so much so that screenshots of Mac OS X 10.1 look very foreign to someone used to working with Mac OS 10.4. In fact, these two systems look about as similar as Windows 98 and Windows XP. However, public perception can be that progress has been minimal because of how Apple has chosen to name their new operating system. It would be more accurate to view this product as Mac OS X Version 4 than as a simple point release.
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Installation and First Impressions

My system disks were of Mac OS X 10.4.0, and installation was breezy. It took a little over 20 minutes to install on my G5, but it took quite a bit longer on my PowerBook G3. After rebooting, there was some performance lag as Spotlight indexed my hard drive, but that was quickly resolved. I quickly played with as many toys as I could including Automator, Dashboard, Spotlight, and the snazzy new screen-savers! Everything worked as expected.
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My G5 seemed noticeably faster overall. I'm continually impressed how each Mac OS revision seems to make that machine snappier (even though it's a 1.8 GHz SP, which is supposedly adversely affected by 10.4). Startup time is also speedier. On average, my G5 takes roughly 30 seconds to boot. Unfortunately, Mac OS 10.4 has had the opposite affect on my PowerBook G3, and the poor thing seems to struggle under this system's weight. I guess I should have known I was in trouble when my old PowerBook was not on the initial list of supported hardware. (It appeared a few days later.)
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What about stability? So far, there have been no kernal panics. Actually, I have been fortunate enough to never have had one of these, and I have been an OS X user since the Public Beta came out. My PowerBook began my OS X experience, and my old Graphite iMac DV joined the X era when Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" came out. In addition to the lack of kernal panics on either my G5 or my PowerBook G3, I have experienced no system freezes, and the only application to "Unexpectedly Quit" has been Microsoft Word 2004 on my laptop. My desktop has had absolutely zero flakiness ... outside of some that was my own doing.
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My only real complaint is the fact that 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 (as well as some other miscellaneous updates) had already been released prior to my purchase of Tiger in late August, but the boxed version I got did not contain these updates, so both my desktop and my laptop had to download those updates after installation. I had kind of expected those updates to be "in the box" by then. For reference, 10.4.1 had been released May 16, and 10.4.2 had been released July 12. My purchase of Mac OS X 10.4 was on August 20.
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New Features

Dashboard: Dashboard is the flashiest of the new features, and it is the feature that will probably remain most associated with Tiger. Dashboard is a compnant of Exposé, which was introduced by Apple in 10.3 "Panther." Dashboard is a separate layer from the desktop that runs mini applications callsed "widgets." These widgets are one-trick ponies that can do things like track shipments, monitor the weather, control iTunes, convert measurements, and act as a calendar. There are thousands of widgets freely available for download on the Internet, and there are a few more sophisticated ones that cost a few dollars. Fortunately, Apple has included an interface for installing and managing widgets as of the 10.4.2 update.



By in large, I find Dashboard pretty useful. I used to run Konfabulator strictly in Konsposé mode, so Dashboard offered little adjustment for me. The screenshot shows my most frequently used widgets, and they all do the job well. My only gripe is with the general laginess of Dashboard when you open it the first time after login. Personally, I have to recommend a tiny app called Dashboard Starter if you think you'll use Dashboard a lot. All it does is launch Dashboard on login, thereby making the widgets more responsive once you are ready to use them.

Spotlight: Spotlight is the integrated system search feature of Mac OS 10.4. You can envoke Spotlight by clicking on a magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen or by using the keyboard command Command-Space. Spotlight searches while you type, which is fine on fast systems, but I wish there was the option for it to wait for you to hit Return on my slower G3 system. Most of the time, if I lose something, Spotlight can find it for me. However, on my PowerBook G3, I've noticed that about half of my documents never get searched, and I'm not sure how to correct that situation. I'm a pretty organized person and seldom lose track of where I have information stowed, but Spotlight has come in handy during those times I have lost track of stuff.

Here's what a Spotlight window looks like if you ask it to show you all results from the Spotlight menu. Could this be the future of the Finder?



Automator: Automator may be one of the cooler new features that few will discover and even fewer may use. I can't comment too much about Automator because I'm still learning about it. Basically, Automator is designed to bring one-step goodness to repetitive tasks. For example, you could apply a sepia tone filter to multiple photographs at once. You may want to assign Spotlight Keywords to multiple items, or you could name several files sequentially (August 01.pdf, August 02.pdf, etc.). There is a learning curve involved, but Automator is a nice example of how Apple sometimes succeeds in thinking outside the box. I think I'm going to really like Automator once I get used to it.

Here's a screen capture of one of Automator's sample workflows. You can add and rearrange steps using simple drag-and-drop.



Other New Features: QuickTime is now at verison 7 and supports a new high-definition codec. Unfortuantely, QuickTime 7 does not seem to be as responsive as QuickTime 6 was when viewing .mpg videos in a browser window (Safari or Firefox). Some new Finder features include Burnable Folders and Smart Folders. Both are quite useful, especially the Burn Folders, which allow you to set up a burn session without a CD or DVD actually being inserted in the drive. FIanlly, the built in RSS support in Safari is cool, but if you are used to a dedicated RSS aggregator (like NetNewsWire), Safari probably won't offer enough features to make you switch.

There are plenty more little touches that separate Mac OS X 10.4 from previous releases, but this gives an overview of some of the most obvious enhancements.

Under the Hood

More important than the superficial enhancements are the "under the hood" improvements to Mac OS X 10.4. These are the changes that most will never see or know about but that affect how the system and applications work. Apple refers to these as "key technologies," and they include such elements as H.264 support, Core Image, Core Data, and Core Audio. Core Audio was introduced in either Jaguar or Panther, and it created a robust set of integrated audio functionality right into the operating system that any application can potentially have access to. Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro is a good example of an application that takes advantage of Core Audio.

New to the Core Foundation Technologies are Core Image and Core Data. Core Data is over my head, but it meant to improve the data-model framework used by applications. Core Data is important to Spotlight's functionality, and it uses database concepts to organize and manage data from any application built to utilize it. This, like other Core Foundation Technologies, is aimed squarely at developers and making Mac OS X as attractive of a development platform as possible. Furthermore, Core Image, like Core Audio, provides developers with a respectable palette of image tools that can be seamlessly integrated into their application. Image Tricks by BeLight Software is a nice utility that is built entirely around the Core Image filters.

What does this mean to the end user? It means future Mac OS X applications can take advantage of all sorts of great technologies that would formerly have had to be integrated manually. Imagine a presentation application that could apply audio effects to sounds and music in the presentation, that could manipulate images right in the application by applying Gaussian blur and sepia tone filters without having to rely on a separate image editor, all while indexing every bit of content in your presentation for easy searching later. An application like this would be very possible utilizing Apple's Core Foundation Technologies (which makes me wonder what new features we'll see in Keynote 3). I don't understand half of the technical documentation regarding Core Foundation, but I do know that I've been impressed more than once by applications that make good use of these technologies.

Dashboard and Safari RSS are nifty and fun. Core Foundation Technologies are the stepping stones that will build the future of the Macintosh platform.
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The Interface.

See that cool screenshot? Yeah, Mac OS X 10.4 doesn't quite look that good. That screenshot is actually the product of two different interface modifications (iTuno and SmoothStripes Sunken Mod if you must know). Don't get me wrong, I really like the Aqua user interface, and I am a big fan of the new "Unified" look that Mail 2 sports. I just don't like how every other application seems to have a different version of Aqua applied to it. The Finder, for example, still looks basically like it did in the days of Jaguar, while iTunes has a drastically different appearance using similar elements, and don't get me started on GarageBand.

Aqua has evolved greatly since the days of Mac OS X 10.0. It is much more subdued than it used to be, and pinstripes are pretty much gone. However, it seems that Apple has been improving the interface in bits and pieces. Unfortunately for users, this results in a very inconsistent visual experience. On the other hand, this may be intentional. Software developers seem to be moving to having different applications having distinct looks and feels (Windows Media Player and Office 12 anyone?). It's just not my cup of tea. Fortunately, applications like Unsanity's ShapeShifter make modifying the systems appearance fairly painless.

The Kitchen Sink & Conclusion

I know there are many aspects of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger I have failed to overview in detail. For example, I haven't talked much about H.264, nor have I said anything about the new metadata features that have worked their way into Tiger. iChat AV has gone untouched on my computer, so there was no use in even mentioning it, and accessibility features as well as the new parental controls are absent from this overview. 10.4 is a huge system filled with features, and there is no way I'm going to be able to cover all of them.

Tiger is another step toward making Mac OS X a more robust and feature-rich environment to work in. Some features like Dashboard are very visible while others, like Automator, may seem more daunting to the average user. Some features have been left strangely hidden, like the Finder's Slideshow functionality, while many of the other enhancements are at the system level, invisible to most people. Overall, I'm glad we bought Tiger, and I'm really looking forward to the enhancements and changes that will be brought by Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in late 2006!

Tags: macintosh, software, opinion, tiger, os x

"Open up my head and let me out." Do I have that song quote right? I'm a bit to sleepy at the moment to go look it up. Quite a bit has been going on lately, and I haven't had much time to post about any of it.

One of the more interesting tidbits lately has been some quotes attributed to Edgar Bronfman, Jr. of Warner Music Group where he attacks Apple's fixed pricing structure in the iTunes Music Store, and he claims right to a chunk of Apple's profit margins on the iPod because people buy the iPod to carry music they distribute. Interesting thoughts – however, I think this guy is only managing to confirm Steve Jobs comments about "greedy" record executives.

First, let's look at the pricing structure controversy. I agree with Mr. Bronfman completely on this. Charging $0.99 for every song is unfair. Prices should cap at $0.99/song for premium songs, and perhaps we can set a basement price of $0.49 for less popular material with prices in between the two limits for various material. That sound fair, right? Oh, you want to charge more for the popular tunes, even in 128 kbps encoding. Yeah, that's just greedy.

(By the way, I know Apple is responsible for the encoding quality of the songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, but I do think is should still be a factor in the price. If they start supporting 256 kbps or more, then we'll talk.)

Now let's examine the second point: The record labels deserve a cut of iPod sales. If we follow this reasoning, every publisher or developer that creates titles for the Macintosh deserve a percentage of every computer Apple sells. The same goes for Miscrosoft and Windows software. After all, who would buy a computer that runs no software? Every network and production studio should get a cut of every television sold. Every radio station should get a cut of every stereo sold. Every web site should get kickback from internet subscriptions.

I'm sorry, record labels are not special and do not deserve special treatment. They deserve no cut of the iPod pie any more than I deserve a cut of AOL's profits. Verdict: Greed.

I love music. I love listening to a wide variety of music from Bach to Bob Dylan, the Beatles to Dave Matthews to Philip Glass. However, it's sad to see the powers over such a worthwhile medium are so much more concerned with lining their pockets thatn they are the fair treatment of the consumers that support them. Then again, that really is one of the biggest weaknesses of the United States in general: "My money before your wellfare."

I know Apple has its own agenda, and it may be playing cards that just make the record labels take the bad PR when iTunes Music Store prices rise, but I hope Steve Jobs rakes people like Mr. Bronfram across as many coals as he can before relenting. There, end soap box rant.

Wow, I actually started this post feeling all calm and serene, and now I'm all in a huff. That means I don't even want to start addressing these other comments from our (edit: sorry, Finland's) beloved record industry! ; )

Tags: riaa, opinion

I hate to add fuel to a fire that should have never started, but the recent attacks on the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) have got me thinking of how much we seem to need protection from ourselves.

You see, this whole brouhaha launched when some content that some described as "sexually explicit" was discovered in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The fact that this material is only accessible on the PC version of the game (not the console versions) by means of hacking the application seems to be completely irrelevant. As a result of the mess, the ESRB changed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to Adult Only (AO) from Mature (M). (More Info Here.)

The issue is being brought up again with Capcom's stylish puzzle-shooter, Killer 7. Again, the same attorney, Mr. Jack Thompson, is behind the crusade, and he is appealing to his prior allies, Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, for support. The drive is to have Killer 7 changed from an "M" rating to "AO." This time, Mr. Thomson takes things one step further and claims the ESRB should be dismantled if they do not submit to his requests. (Article Here.)

So, I hear many of my readers asking, why do I seem to be taking the side of the ESRB and the video game publishers on this one? Am I not opposed to such material in entertainment media? Don't I believe that children should be protected from such content? Well, of course I do, and that's why I say buyers should look at the label and see it is already rated "M" for Mature.

It's very simple, "M" in the video game world is the equivalent on an "R" rating in the movie world, and "R"-rated movies with content much more explicit and disturbing are created and available in normal retail stores. We all know what an "R" rating means. Despite this, I know of people who won't let their children watch a movie if it's rated "PG-13," yet these same children have several "M"-rated video games.

It all comes down to being responsible consumers. Game ratings will not change the content in video games any more than movie ratings have helped movies become more wholesome and moral over the last couple decades. We parents have to become more informed about what content is in the games, and the way to do this is easy: Flip over the box, and read why the game is rated what it's rated.

For example, Katamari Damacy is rated "E" (for "Everyone"), and it is qualified with "Mild Fantasy Violence." Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is rated "T" (for "Teen"), and its content includes "Blood," "Suggestive Themes," and "Violence." Now let's take Killer 7, which is rated "M" for "Blood and Gore," "Intense Violence," "Sexual Themes," and "Strong Language." Based off of those descriptions alone, do you think it is possible to make responsible buying decisions for your family? I do.

Of course, this brings up a whole slew of other issues. One issue is consistany. If we are to be this strict on the gaming industry, why has explicit material become so common on TV and in movies. After all, Jennifer Garner is allowed to run around in fetish costumes in Alias during prime time with but a "TV14" rating while nudity is becoming more and more common in "PG-13" movies, and don't tell me that Desperate Housewives has no sexual content.

Another issue is that of built-in content versus mods and add-ons. This same Jack Thompson alleged that EA's The Sims titles should be changed to an "M" rating from "T" because one can download nude skins for the characters off of the Internet. EA neither creates or endorses this material, but those facts seem to be trivial.

Mr. Thompson, the solution is not to dismantle the only industry watchdog. The answer is in responsible, informed consumerism on the part of parents and caregivers – unless I'm solving the wrong problem. If the problem is trying to figure out how to gain more media and political attention, then you have found a topic that will get you that attention.

Tags: video games, opinion

Lately, I have been playing around with the demo for Sibelius 4. For those of you who don't know what this is, Sibelius is a music application that can be used to notate, print, and play music. (It can actually do quite a bit more, but this is not an in-depth review.) Very simply put, a program like Sibelius is to music notation as MS Word is to word processing.

I have been a Sibelius user for quite some time now. I used to swear by Finale, but it took Coda Music Technologies (now MakeMusic Inc.) so long aggravatingly long to release a Mac OS X native version of Finale that I jumped ship after playing around with a demo of Sibelius 2 under OS X. Now I am using Sibelius 3 for my daily music notation needs, so the announcement of version 4 quite naturally caught my eye.

From the onset, Sibelius 4 behaves more like a Mac OS X application than its predecessors. Instead of being an app in a folder with a bunch of other files it requires to operate, Sibelius 4 is a "package." Also, Sibelius 4 uses Mac OS X standard directories for filing specialized information.

Once the application launches, there are many small refinements and touches that instantly distinguish this version. The main toolbar is smaller and less gaudy. More useful commands are in that toolbar, and floating windows support transparency effects (like the Formatting Palette in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X.)

Good Experiences

Dragging symbols and articulations around feels generally snappier. The Worksheet Creator is great and will save me a lot of time in the future. The Preferences dialogue box is much better than the one(s) in Sibelius 3. I like having the option to activate and deactivate floating windows from the toolbar, and the Mixer seems more responsive and less buggy than in Sibelius 3. Furthermore, the new ability to copy & paste into a word processor works as documented for the demo. It pasted fine into Word and into Pages, but it looked horrible. I can't complain, though, because it's a documented limitation of the demo.

Next up is Dynamic Parts. One word: Wow. Now here come several more words. In the past, once a score is completed, you would have to "extract" the individual parts. This is time consuming, and changes you make in the score later are not reflected in any parts you've already extracted. Dynamic Parts changes this. As a score is being written, you can choose any part from a menu n the toolbar, and it instantly appears on screen. Any changes you make within that part are simultaneously reflected in the score and vice versa. This could potentially be a huge time saver.

Another neat aspect of Dynamic Parts is the fact that you can pull up all the parts in one dialogue, set the number of copies needed of each part, and have them all print out in a tidy little package. While this feature can't be completely tested in the demo, it is functional enough to give you a good idea of how it will work.

Finally comes the much hyped video capabilities in Sibelius 4. Basically, you can have a movie open that you might be writing music for, and you can see exactly how the music lines up with the video. This would have been so great to have when I was working on our fifth grade "Virtual Scrapbook" DVD. I'm just beginning to figure this feature out, but I am seriously liking what I am seeing.

Iffy Experiences

Overall, the demo of Sibelius 4 is very good, and I am going to have to get pretty nit-picky here. (I love it when software is so good that I have to look for the flaws.)

First, there are a couple of visual bugs in the toolbar. The menus for Dynamic Parts and Page Zoom don't blend well with the toolbar, and the arrows to drop the menus down seem to be a few pixels off. Just as minor, launching the application seems to be slower than in Sibelius 3, but I'll write both of these off as quirks of pre-release software.

I'm not sure what I think of the playback controls being in their own floating window rather than in the main toolbar. It seems like unnecessary clutter. Also, in Sibelius 3, playback would begin from the last note you clicked on. Now you have to drag a slider to the point you want playback to begin at. This can be a real nuisance when working with long scores because the slider likes to reset at the beginning quite often.

As far as the keypad goes, it remains pretty much unchanged, but I would like to see it gain some flexibility. First, it would be nice if a tuplet section was added, so triplets, sextuplets, and the like could be controlled from the keypad. Also, a nice feature would be if the sections could be viewed simultaneously as expandable and collapsable sections. Again, I am thinking of something like the Formatting Palette in the Mac version of Office.

Expanding from that topic, many commonly used features, such as dynamic markings, tempos, clefs, and the like are buried in menus. While not suggesting that Sibelius gain the same visual clutter as Finale 2004, it would be interesting to see if they could include some kind of customizable toolbar in future versions of Sibelius where someone could keep commands they frequently use.

Finally, Finale has upped the ante on high quality audio samples by including 100+ sounds form Garritan Personal Orchestra in Finale 2006. Sibelius offers 100+ sounds with Kontakt Player Silver, but the real difference comes with the pitched instruments (instruments that can play a melody). Sibelius comes with 19 high quality pitched instruments. On the other hand, Finale 2006 will come with about 50 Garritan pitched instruments. To me, that seems like a point of competition which needs addressing.

The Unknown

There are some things about Sibelius that are still unknown. I've had some pretty weird bugs pop up when exporting to audio in Sibelius 3 from time to time, and I hope those are resolved in Sibelius 4, but that feature is unavailable in the demo. Also, as I understand it, Sibelius 4 will pre-load any sound libraries selected to eliminate the lag that exists when inputting notes or playing back a score for the first time. While this is sure to have benefits, I wonder this will affect Sibelius memory footprint. These questions won't be resolved until i can get my hands of a shipping copy, though.

Conclusion

Sibelius 4 is shaping up to be a very strong release. It retains the clean interface of Sibelius but almost to a fault. Again, the fact that many common items are buried in menus and dialogue boxes can be daunting to a user until they become well-versed in all of the keyboard commands. However, the benefits of Sibelius easily outweigh such small quarrels.

The only real point of contention I have with Sibelius is Kontakt Player Silver. In its current state, the high quality GPO sounds included with Finale 2006 soundly trump what is included with Sibelius, and I'm growing more of the opinion that Kontakt Player Gold should not be a separate $150 purchase, especially when comparing the lists of instruments included in Kontakt Player Gold and those included with Finale 2006.

As I said, though, Sibelius 4 has some strong features, but Sibelius needs to continue to innovate and provide value. Much of Sibelius' current Macintosh user base is probably a result of Finale ceasing to be a value for several years. Now that they have that base, they need to work to keep it.

Tags: software, technology, opinion, sibelius

Journals.ars has an entry posted in the M-Dollar section with screenshots of Longhorn Build 5203. For those of you unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, Longhorn is the code name for the next iteration of Microsoft Windows that is set to replace WindowsXP. Currently, Longhorn (or whatever it will be called) is set for release in late 2006, but some sources claim that the date will probably slip to early 2007. Being the geek that I am, I couldn't help but check the images out. Even though I'm a pretty die-hard Mac user, I still love ogling screenshots, especially desktops of any yet-to-be-released operating system (OS).

I can't comment on things like functionality or performance of this build. I personally haven't had the opportunity to play around with any Longhorn builds, so anything I say on those matters would be uninformed speculation. Therefore, these comments will be limited to the appearance of the Longhorn interface in this build. Please note that these comments may quickly become out of date seeing that this is unfinished software, and the interface may go through several revisions before the product's release.

Nice Comments

On the whole, the interface seems pretty sleek and elegant. It retains familiar Windows metaphors while visually separating itself from prior releases. With this release, Microsoft has definitely addressed the garishness of WindowsXP and the criticisms leveled toward the "plex" interface of previous Longhorn builds. Also, the icons are showing improvement. I especially like the Recycle Bin icon, but I wish the screenshots here included the full state of the Recycle Bin as well.

The "Computer" window in screenshot seven has nice progress bars visually representing how much of the disk space is currently being used. I have to admit that a similar function is lacking in the Mac OS X Finder. (Yes, I know that the FInder shows how much space is available at the bottom of the Finder window, but visual indicators are nice too.) Also the Spotlight...err, Search field in the Start Menu is a nice touch.

Concerns

Interface translucency is a very cool thing, and I am a sucker for glassy effects. However, translucency in the title bars may not be a good idea, especially in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer where the location and search fields are also translucent. Some serious usability issues could come out of this (as Apple learned in the early OS X days when inactive title bars became translucent.) On the other hand, the blurring of the background through the translucent objects may alleviate this problem.

Another issue could be performance. Okay, now I'm speculating, but eye-candy like translucency and gaussian blurs eat processor cycles. Also, cool 3D effects have also been demoed – again more cycles. Hopefully the new Desktop Composition Engine (DCE, code named Avalon) will help take care of this, much as Quartz Extreme helps offload much of the eye-candy in Mac OS X onto the graphics processor. Additionally, Microsoft will probably let the user decide what eye-candy is active in the Appearance Manager.

Finally, Microsoft seems to be falling prey to the visual inconsistencies that have been cropping up in Mac OS X for the past few years. In Longhorn, there is a black gradient Taskbar which opens to a Start Menu that follows similar aesthetics. This contrasts with glassy windows in Windows Explorer as well as some applications like Paint and Internet Explorer. Furthermore, one of the screenshots shows navigation and information elements within two different file windows where the information has backgrounds of different colors. (Perhaps this isn't so bad because the different colors may represent different directories, but it still seems like overkill.) Then, also in this category, is Windows Media Player, which seems to follow its own set of rules separate and apart from the rest of the OS (much like iTunes does in Mac OS X).

Miscellany

What is with Microsoft's obsession with green elements? They are all over the place in XP, and here we see that the Star Menu's active state is green. Oh well, at least it doesn't clash with the rest of the interface like it does in XP's Luna style.

Is it me, or does the search icon in the Start Menu, Windows Explorer, and Internet Explorer look exactly like the icon for Apple's Spotlight and the search field in Safari? (Edit: I'll take this one back. After looking over GUIdebook, this icon seems a natural evolution of the icon Microsoft has used for search since Windows 95. Also, it's pointing the opposite direction from Spotlight's and Safari's icons.)

Conclusion

Microsoft is making progress with WIndows Longhorn, and it looks to improve on Windows' strengths while addressing some of its past weaknesses. It has hit some serious bumps in its development, and it will be some time before Longhorn reaches the potential that it initially promised. Regardless, this looks like it is shaping up to be a decent upgrade for Windows users, and while it may not inspire any switchers off the Mac (not me at any rate), it will have some of us wishing Mac OS X had translucent windows instead of brushed metal.

For further reading on Windows Longhorn, visit the Longhorn section of the SuperSite for Windows.

Tags: technology, microsoft, opinion, software

Okay, this will be quick and dirty. I never thought to mention this in my previous article because this issue never crossed my mind.

Using Intel processors will not open Macintosh computers up to waves of viruses, malware, or spyware. The vast majority of malicious software you hear about in the news targets Windows. Stated even more clearly, these viruses and such attack the software, not the hardware. Therefore, as long as you do not install Windows on your shiny new MacTel (which would be silly), you should be no more prone to virus attacks and such than you are right now.

Feel better? Good. Now go take some deep breaths; play some Katamari Damacy, and don't worry about Macintosh security. It's still there.

Tags: security, macintosh, opinion

Now that I've had a couple of days to digest the information, I thought I'd post a few thoughts about the PowerPC to x86 transition Steve Jobs announced at this year's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC).

Weekend Jitters

The weekend before WWDC, rumors were spreading around the Internet that Apple was in talks with Intel, and these talks were going to lead to an announcement that Apple would be abandoning the PowerPC architecture for the x86 architecture. Sure, these rumors had been around for years, but this time it was different. Publications with more clout and reputation at stake were reporting these rumors as solid fact.

The Macintosh community was abuzz with discussions. Forum topics would surpass a thousand posts in under an hour, and the debate kept returning to the same basic theme: Could this be for real?

I have to admit to being a nay-sayer. I thought Apple was going to use Intel's ARM processor in future mobile devices. I even agreed with Daring Fireball's article that speculated (far-fetched as it may sound) that Intel had wooed Apple with its own variant of the PowerPC architecture. Perhaps they could provide the speed in the PowerPC that IBM had so far failed to deliver. The thought that Apple would take an undertaking this large seemed unrealistic, especially after the rocky OS 9 to OS X shift.

The Announcement

Incidentally, I had been preparing some thoughts about how Apple had grown content with its current position in the market and how it seemed to be a company that was finished, for the time being, with going out on limbs. I knew just how wrong that line of thinking was when the headline came up on MacCentral reading: "The Rumors Are True."

What was most surprising wasn't the shift itself, though. What was surprising was how Steve Jobs made it seem like this was not a big deal, and developers would be able to easily take this shift in stride. More so, he even had demonstrable evidence that this was the case. Rosetta will be able to run PowerPC compiled apps on the x86 processors (with some caveats we'll explore later). Mathmatica was recompiled for x86 in about two hours, and the new version of XCode can dual-compile applications, so a developer can ship software that can run on both architectures on the same disc.

"Impressive. Most impressive."

The comprehensiveness by which this transition is being handled should not, in retrospect, have been so surprising. After all, Apple is a company that thinks and plans before it acts. Additionally, Apple had already weathered a substantial platform transition in recent history from which they could learn. As it turns out, Mac OS X has been running on x86 machines practically from Day 1. In fact, its BSD core makes it inherently portable. Some saw this day coming. Fortunately, Apple had planned well for it.

The Timing

One of the arguments against this dramatic change happening now was the fact that the OS 9 to OS X migration was really only just settling down, even though it has been five years since the introduction of OS X. Why would Apple force its users and developers through another tectonic shift in such a short amount of time? Furthermore, such a shift would require time, and PowerPC Macintosh sales will surely take a hit with the promise of an entirely new architecture.

Right now, Apple is a strong company, both in public perception and financially. Possibly, Apple's executives see this as a good time to undertake this task for precisely that reason. PowerPC was putting Apple's lineup (especially the expensive stuff) in a precarious position, and the performance gap between high end Macs and PCs had ceased to narrow. In time, it may have even begun to widen again.

As a side note: Remember the days of the G4 towers? Back when they were introduced, everybody still measured processor speeds by megahertz. As Intel moved past the 1 GHz barrier, Motorola was still providing Apple with G4 chips running at about 600 MHz. Until the introduction of the G5, Apple's high end lineup was looking very weak. It looks like this time, Apple is trying to avoid history repeating itself.

Yes, Macintosh sales will drop off for a couple of quarters. Hopefully, iPod sales will help offset that. We may even see some price-cutting on PowerPC-based Macintoshes in order to get them out of the warehouses. Fortunately, Apple will be taking these lumps from a position of strength. Had they waited another couple of years, the outlook may have been more grim.

Fear and Paranoia

Of course, there are some who proclaim this as the Death of Apple. (In fact, I wonder how The Mac Observer's Apple Death Knell Counter is doing right now.) The biggest fear is, of course, that people will widely adopt Window's emulators for their Macs and the need for Macintosh software and game development will come to a screeching halt. This reasoning is a load of dingo's kidneys. Emulators are a pain. They also rob you of the Macintosh user experience, and some can even leave you vulnerable to viruses and malware.

Take X11 for example. Every Macintosh user has X11 available to them to provide a graphical interface for UNIX based apps (which are all free, I might add). Now raise your hand if you know what X11 is. Keep it up if you have installed X11 onto your Mac. Okay, now keep your hand up if you regularly use X11. Alright, I see about three hands, and mine is not one of them. I messed with X11 some and decided it was too much of a pain. Thanks for the option, but I'll stick with my native Mac OS X apps.

Mac OS X is a fully independent platform. Most users will not want to bother with emulators or virtual machines, and those hardcore geeks or gamers who do will be a vanishingly small percentage. Mac developers will still be needed, and the market is not going to vanish simply because of an architecture change.

The Trade Offs

There are definite gains in switching to the x86 architecture. Mac users will probably see more rapid adoption of PC-first technology alongside Apple's innovations. Macintosh ports will probably take less time in the long run. Speed will be a definite gain, and we will hopefully see more and better updates to Apple's laptop line (which used to be the strongest aspect of their product matrix). It's very likely that there are even more advantages I haven't even thought of yet.

However, there are some trade-offs. The mystique and elegance of the PowerPC architecture will be a thing of the past to Macintosh users. Sure, Macs will finally have performance parity, but there will no longer be that hope of one day PowerPC Macs will speed past WinTel systems. From a subjective standpoint, the switch to x86 makes Macs a little less special now. (See this article for more.) I just hope those "Intel Inside" stickers don't get plastered all over the hardware!

(Is this a good point to mention the whole frontside bus issue? Sure, we'll be seeing 3.2 GHz Macs soon, but their FSB will drop to 800 MHz. In fact, I could not find a single Intel processor with a FSB that surpassed 1 GHz like the G5s do. I wonder how that will affect things. It's weird to think that my 1.8 GHz G5 has a faster bus than a 3+ GHz Pentium 4.)

Additionally, software will be spotty for a while – even with Rosetta. Apps that require a G4/G5 processor do not seem to work. AltiVec instructions will be lost, and Classic apps will not work. Actually, the whole Classic thing doesn't bother me in the least, but it might affect someone. Hopefully, companies will release patches for existing products (if that is possible). However, I bet that if I want an x86 native version of Sibelius for the Macintosh, I'm going to have to save my pennies for a new version. Just like the migration from OS 9 to OS X, there are going to have to be some major software purchases.

Conclusion

I was dismayed at first to read the news that Apple would be switching to the x86 architecture, but now I am cautiously optimistic. The road will be a bumpy one, but at the end of it, I will still be a Mac user. After all, it's really the operating system and the software that makes a Mac what it is. Furthermore, I'm sure Apple will retain its great industrial design (and PowerMacs will hopefully get to shrink some now). Everything that makes an Apple an Apple will still be in place, and I guess that's all that really matters.

Tags: intel, opinion, macintosh