Tag Archives: osx

Intelligent Defaults Save Time

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Have you ever been a regular at a coffee shop? The barista knows you by name, and every morning when you come by, she’s already got your Triple Non-Fat Sugar-Free Vanilla Latte waiting for you. That’s an intelligent default. She doesn’t know for sure that’s what you want, or even that you’ll come in today, but you’ve ordered it enough times before that she’s confident making it.

Well-written software can have intelligent defaults, too, and you can give your users that same feeling of anticipating their needs. Here are a few examples of programs that found a clever way to save their users’ time with common, repetitive tasks. Continue reading →

Dude, I Rule

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“I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.”
– Randall in Clerks

That about sums up how I feel right now. When I set up KillingMachines.org, it was the first time I had ever put up a website with a clear goal in mind. And not just a goal, but a list of them. I wanted nothing less than to write the best weblog site available. I had been to livejournal and blogger and was unimpressed. FCS could do most of what they did, and what it couldn’t do was made up for by the fact that it didn’t suck like they did. Who wants to pay to use a weblog site? And haven’t these people ever heard of databases? Why on earth are they ftp’ing the blog entries?

And so I wrote my manifesto. KillingMachines would become, with Steve’s help, and building on the base of FCS, the site I imagined. Users would be able to completely skin their journals. They could set their account to be either a personal journal, or a forum where everyone could post. They would automatically receive a subdomain for their journal. They could turn replies on and off. Most of these features were just pipe dreams at the time, but Steve helped me out a lot, and we got the site up and running, and eventually, only two major features were missing: User-defined skins for journals, and the ability to set an account to be either forum or journal.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally gotten these features working, and KillingMachines is now FEATURE COMPLETE. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, but basically the site has everything it needs to be the best weblog site ever. I’m extremely proud of it, and I genuinely believe that given time, word of mouth will turn KMorg into a weblog powerhouse on the web!

And as if that wasn’t cool enough, something else is going my way! Recently, I got the idea in my head that it might be nice to have a Macintosh. The germ behind this idea is osX. This fine operating system is really fun to play with, and the fact that it’s built on a base of BSD makes it hard for me to resist. However, I’m not about to ditch my PC for a mac. I just like the idea of having one around to play with. As a result, I couldn’t justify spending $700 for a new one. Just today, I was mentioning to Annie that if I could find an iMac for around $300, I would probably buy it.

Well, today I may have found one. I’ve been talking with the owner, and she’s been looking to offload her old blueberry G3 iMac 333Mhz. I offered her $250, and things are looking good. Pretty soon, I might have a nice little mac sitting on my desk, waiting for me to grab a copy of osX!

Aqua Skin

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I finally finished my Max OSX style skin! Head over to the options page and select “Aqua” from the drop down menu.

There’s only one catch. It won’t work right under Internet Explorer on a PC. Microsoft has this stupid bug involving transparent .png files, so it’ll look really weird on there. However, if you’re using Mozilla or IE on a Mac, you’re good to go!

See the “aqua” skin in the archives.

Macintosh OS X Release

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So I’m at The Computer Store.

It’s 8:40 AM.

Saturday.

I’m behind the service counter eating Snak Pak Cheezy Bitz Peanut Butter Crackers.

Wearing an “X… The Future Is Here” T-shirt.

There are like 50 people in this small store milling around for the OS TEN RELEASE.

Floor manager has marked a printer-paper box as a ballot receptacle for the “Win A Copy Of Os X” drawing. He used not just a permanent, but an ultra-permanent marker. I can feel my face, my eyes and lips, burning from the toluene vapors. Neurons sloughing off my medulla and puddling around my brainstem.

So I’m coming live to you from the OS Ten release and I must say I feel sorry for all these people who got up at got knows what hour to queue up in front of the store at 7:45, eighteen deep, to come look at Ten. I mean, we should at least have some carnival clowns or a ferris wheel in here to liven things up, I mean at least a monkey grinder, come on man. OOH LOOK THE “DOCK” and “AQUA” ! THE ICONS RESEMBLE POLISHED GEMS!

My boss just told me he thought it was a bust. We weren’t selling very many copies. He wouldn’t buy OS Ten. It sucks, now. It’ll be great in six months. Shrug. He walked away. Then a gum wrapper came flying through the air, caromed off my thigh and into the trash can. “Ha! Bank shot off the knee!”

My coworker fears the “weenies” who are going to be bringing their sick computers in to us, having hosed the BSD-based installations of MacOS through their insistence on tinkering with THAT WHICH THEY UNDERSTAND NOT. The Terminal (a command-line interface to OS ten’s BSD foundation) provides infinite ways for them to mess up their systems.

With MacOS 9 or earlier, you could fix almost any problem with one of three methods short of a clean install:

  1. reinstall part of the software
  2. uninstall part of the software
  3. run a disk-checking utility

With 10, excuse me, X, it’s going to be like, “Oh you’ve got malformed XML in your mtab which is causing your Zip disk to emit that horrible clicking noise. You need to renice your nohups to 0xfdeadbeef” and blood will start gushing from the customer’s ears. “What?? What are you talking about, you horrible technical person? I can’t understand you!!” Whereas before, we could just say, “reinstall the Zip software.” Well, I hope I’m wrong and you can still deal with things at that high level of installers and control panels, because otherwise the answer to every question is going to be, “bring it in. We’ll fix it.”

Whew… the very thought of building a consumer OS on BSD… it’s like some horror movie where a band of occultists form a corporation and start selling people demon powered cars.. only the customers don’t understand the black creeping power that lurks within their engine compartment and due to their throwing the salt over the wrong shoulder it bursts out one day in tentacular horror and devours them.

So yeah, I’d wait six months.