Applications: The undiscovered country
Finding the answer to a question you didn't know
you were asking is one of the joys of a switx.
There is something about a new platform that
forces you to reconsider what you know about
computing.
Platforms attract different tribes with their own views of the world. These communities or user groups follow the lead of those that came before. These cultures tend to solidify within a couple of generations of software iterations. I have witnessed this on the many platforms I have used intimately since 1983.
One of the joys of OS X is it held the Apple Classic community loyal even while it attracted Unix gurus. The modern OS X tribe is richer for the immigration from other faiths, and to my mind most closely resembles the Amiga community c. 1990, which was innovative and just a little off-beat and creative.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Mac community as it absorbs Windows asylum seekers lured by the iPod and Mac Mini and the prospect of stronger security.
As a "switxer" (someone who switched their personal information duties from Windows to Mac OS X) there are a lot of "aaah" moments, where a solution neatly falls into place.
Sometimes this is screamingly obvious -- such as with iLife -- and other times it is more subtle.
One of those latter moments came with the use of this blogging software, iBlog.
I designed my first website in 1994, just after the first HTML spec was finalised. At the time I was the first journalist in Australia to run a website, a fact my local newspaper reported at the time. In those days, everything had to be sent to the server using Unix Z-modem commands. Quickly, I switched to FTP. Working in a command line environment offered a lot of control, but it was time consuming. And even small changes to code on the server were frustrating to correct if you had to resort to a text editor such as vi or pico.
Then, a couple of years ago, I turned to Blogger. The web-based entry systems were much easier to use, but Blogger was quixotic and after half a year I lost my patience with its constant problems and outages when the service switched servers and deleted my website.
So to iBlog.
Why hasn't Steve Jobs bought this little company? Don't just go knocking your loyal third-party developers on the head and stealing their market, but invest in their good ideas, Steve. It is not hard to see how this natty software captured an O'Reilly Innovation Award.
From download to publishing the first item took less than ten minutes. No hitches or hidden gotchas -- it really was WYSIWYG. It wasn't until I entered my second entry that I had the "wow" moment -- that one where you realise that computers really can make your life easier or extend your capabilities in new and exciting directions. It was a quiet wow, one of the many I have experienced in the last year.
iBlog is a missing piece in the iLife jigsaw puzzle. After having been dismayed by the horror stories others have told me of their experience with content management systems, and having had a few of my own, along comes iBlog and it works just as a Mac should. My admittedly limited experience with this desktop blogging software -- this is just the third entry -- shows that it does what it says it will do.
Integration with iPhoto is seamless -- dump your pics into iPhoto and then choose where in the edited text you want them to appear and, voila, they pop into place.
Although I haven't tried a movie yet, I see the little icon at the top of my editing window for this entry and I assume the same is true for importing from iMovie.
The included cascading style sheets are extremely basic, but they are easy enough to change.
And the code renders XML RSS out of the box. Click "publish" and the whole show uploads to the iDisk on my .Mac account, although there is support for Webdav and FTP as well.
I have barely begun to stretch the capability of iBlog and at some stage in the future it may falter. But as a hassle free way to get into blogging, I haven't seen anything to beat it on any platform.
Platforms attract different tribes with their own views of the world. These communities or user groups follow the lead of those that came before. These cultures tend to solidify within a couple of generations of software iterations. I have witnessed this on the many platforms I have used intimately since 1983.
One of the joys of OS X is it held the Apple Classic community loyal even while it attracted Unix gurus. The modern OS X tribe is richer for the immigration from other faiths, and to my mind most closely resembles the Amiga community c. 1990, which was innovative and just a little off-beat and creative.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Mac community as it absorbs Windows asylum seekers lured by the iPod and Mac Mini and the prospect of stronger security.
As a "switxer" (someone who switched their personal information duties from Windows to Mac OS X) there are a lot of "aaah" moments, where a solution neatly falls into place.
Sometimes this is screamingly obvious -- such as with iLife -- and other times it is more subtle.
One of those latter moments came with the use of this blogging software, iBlog.
I designed my first website in 1994, just after the first HTML spec was finalised. At the time I was the first journalist in Australia to run a website, a fact my local newspaper reported at the time. In those days, everything had to be sent to the server using Unix Z-modem commands. Quickly, I switched to FTP. Working in a command line environment offered a lot of control, but it was time consuming. And even small changes to code on the server were frustrating to correct if you had to resort to a text editor such as vi or pico.
Then, a couple of years ago, I turned to Blogger. The web-based entry systems were much easier to use, but Blogger was quixotic and after half a year I lost my patience with its constant problems and outages when the service switched servers and deleted my website.
So to iBlog.
Why hasn't Steve Jobs bought this little company? Don't just go knocking your loyal third-party developers on the head and stealing their market, but invest in their good ideas, Steve. It is not hard to see how this natty software captured an O'Reilly Innovation Award.
From download to publishing the first item took less than ten minutes. No hitches or hidden gotchas -- it really was WYSIWYG. It wasn't until I entered my second entry that I had the "wow" moment -- that one where you realise that computers really can make your life easier or extend your capabilities in new and exciting directions. It was a quiet wow, one of the many I have experienced in the last year.
iBlog is a missing piece in the iLife jigsaw puzzle. After having been dismayed by the horror stories others have told me of their experience with content management systems, and having had a few of my own, along comes iBlog and it works just as a Mac should. My admittedly limited experience with this desktop blogging software -- this is just the third entry -- shows that it does what it says it will do.
Integration with iPhoto is seamless -- dump your pics into iPhoto and then choose where in the edited text you want them to appear and, voila, they pop into place.
Although I haven't tried a movie yet, I see the little icon at the top of my editing window for this entry and I assume the same is true for importing from iMovie.
The included cascading style sheets are extremely basic, but they are easy enough to change.
And the code renders XML RSS out of the box. Click "publish" and the whole show uploads to the iDisk on my .Mac account, although there is support for Webdav and FTP as well.
I have barely begun to stretch the capability of iBlog and at some stage in the future it may falter. But as a hassle free way to get into blogging, I haven't seen anything to beat it on any platform.
Posted: Thu - April 21, 2005 at 08:23 PM
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Switxer (pron: switcher), n. - A convert to Mac OS X.
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Published On: Apr 25, 2005 05:03 PM
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Published On: Apr 25, 2005 05:03 PM