I found a few things mentioned in the post interesting.

“Coda 2 has now been in development for about a year and a half.”

Three years ago I published an interview with Panic and they seemed to indicate that they were already working on Coda 2 but I guess they didn’t start on it officially for another 18 months. I don’t think they tried to trick us (or me) deliberately but I thought it was interesting considering how early we, the people, were asking Panic to begin working on Coda 2. Amazing insight.

So, when will it ship? Coda 2 is an extremely complex and multi-layered app, and it will take significant time to test, debug, and improve. That means there are many, many more months ahead of us — this release is important and needs to be as close to perfect as possible. So, to those of you currently camped out on the street in front of our office: you’ll need to hang in there for a quite a while still. Thanks for your understanding while we test!

For Panic to come right out and say that it will be “many, many more months” before Coda 2 will ship is fantastic for its users in a number of ways. It is exactly the reason I published the interview with them focused on transparency in software development and not just about the next version of Coda. You’ll remember, if you’re a long-time reader of my blog, how excited I was that immediately following our interview Panic reached out to ask how they could be more transparent, and a bit later they got on Twitter and started a blog.

With this post Panic has educated Coda users so that they’ll know when to expect an update to Coda. They don’t think it is coming before the end of the year but will, more than likely, come sometime early next summer (my guess). This is huge. Over the next 8 or so months if you need an application that does more than Coda currently provides – you may want to look into investing in a different application for the time being. This is a decision that, before this blog came out, would have been very hard to make. Especially for larger development teams.

Imagine starting a company with three, five, or ten developers and that you wanted a license for each of them. You take a look at Coda’s features and you know that you’re developers require, or would prefer, an editor that does something that Coda currently does not. You can now know how long your investment will take take to make a return for you. Perhaps you pick up a Coda 1.x license. Perhaps you don’t. Now you know. Before you didn’t.

If you read my interview with them you’ll know that this is not the way Panic has always operated. In fact, it may not be the way that they prefer to work. But they’re doing it anyway. For you. Noodle that a while and then go thank Panic in their comments.

/via Shawn Blanc.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

As I outlined in Recent software problems:

“Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.”

This problem continues. However, I ran across this solution via a few Google searches.

1. Unplug your Macbook Pro.
2. Put the Mac to sleep (Apple Menu -> Sleep or close the lid)
3. Once asleep, plug your MacBook Pro back in.

I’ve confirmed that this works. I’m still looking forward to a Lion update that addresses these and my other issues.

First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

Calling it a launcher application is sort of limiting. Alfred can help you play music, give you quick access to your clipboard’s history, and even help you attach files to your emails. Its absolutely great and version 0.9 is packed to the gills with new features and updates.

Firefox 4 was released today and once again I’m made to feel this same nauseating feeling. Every single time a new Browser is released, well Safari, Chrome, or Firefox (we’ll leave Internet Explorer, Opera and others out of this), I’m torn between making the jump from one browser to the other.

I’ve jumped around a lot over the years. And it always comes back to one thing that determines whether or not I use a Browser every day; speed. I don’t use many extensions, themes, or add-ons in any Browser. I had used Safari before it even supported such things. Speed, however, keeps me loyal to a Browser until – inevitably – the next-fastest Browser released pulls me away.

On the outset Firefox 4 feels very snappy. Just about as fast as Chrome (if not faster) and a lot faster than Safari. Chrome and Firefox 4 are now neck-and-neck for winning my default Browser of choice. But that’s today and I’m sure that won’t last long and, once again, I’ll be left with the nauseating choice of jumping ship.

iPhone was, as Scott Forstall recently put it, a gold rush for developers. Simple, relatively inexpensive applications for iPhone that hit the top paid, popular or featured lists on the App Store have made some serious dough for their developers. This caused a lot of developers to focus on iPhone either exclusively or in addition to their offerings for either the Mac or PC. They’ve spent a considerable amount of time focused on iPhone app development.

iPad is creating a similar environment. iPhone applications are being ported over to iPad and new applications are being developed and released as quickly as possible – and exclusively for iPad. A lot of time and effort is going into building these applications and I’m sure it will mean a lot of money in the pockets of developers.

You can’t blame the developers for going where the money is but I fear for the future of Mac software and I’m even beginning to fear for iPhone’s. I fear that one day all of the great work, the great applications, the incredible design will have migrated exclusively to iPad. That may not happen for some time and people are still making some serious money on making both Mac and iPhone applications – but the tide is definitely on its way out to the iPad sea.

I sometimes sit and wonder what sort of applications could have been made for the Macintosh if, say, Apple had opened up an App Store that supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Would the river of money have been split into three smaller tributaries? Would people flock to the Mac the same way they have iPhone and now iPad? Arguably the main reasons people buy iPhones and iPads is the ease of finding/installing software and content. Imagine if things were that easy on the Mac. And imagine if developers were excited to build applications for the Mac again!

Apple isn’t out of position yet to make this happen. With a single move, adding Mac software to the App Store, they could start a gold rush for Macintosh developers the way they have for iPhone and iPad developers. Unlike iPhone and iPad, though, it should be just another way to download applications – not the only way to do so. This way both developers and consumers could decide how to get applications themselves and not be forced one way or the other. I think, ultimately, developers would decide to distribute their applications through the App Store because that is how users would choose to get their applications but at least they’d have the choice. Wouldn’t that be great?

But this may never happen and that is why I fear for the future of Mac software.

Yesterday I said that I’d share the many ways in which I use Smart Albums in iPhoto. Instead of sharing all of the ways in one post I figured I’d break them up. One of my Smart Albums helps me to locate possible duplicate photos. Here is why and how this works.

I stress possible duplicates because this Smart Album is neither fool proof nor genius. This is a dead simple Smart Album yet it seems to get the vast majority of duplicate photos in my personal photo library. Perhaps it can help you too.

So, why are there duplicates in the first place?

iPhoto has built-in duplicate photo detection on import. It warns you when it finds what it believes might be a duplicate photo to one that is already in your photo library. iPhoto does a fairly good job at this too and it is based on filename and date/time.

In my own personal experience I’ve found that 90% of my duplicate photos happened because of something that happened just prior to the import process. In some cases it was simply that my Macintosh automatically added a _1 or _2 to the photo’s filename because it already existed in a folder that I was using to store photos prior to importing them into iPhoto. This happens, perhaps, when both my wife and I are storing photos on a laptop while traveling and waiting until we return home to import them into iPhoto.

Since iPhoto does not check the binary of the photo nor does it recognize duplicates based on some sort of ‘visual’ check then some of these duplicate photos slip by. What we end up with is two, or sometimes three, photos that match each other in every way but filename.

For this specific case of duplicate photos that share everything except filename I’ve come up with this simple Smart Album that seems to do a good job at finding most of the duplicates in my photo library. Here are the rules.

This simple Smart Album simply looks for images where the filename ends in _2.jpg, _2.JPG, _1.jpg or _1.JPG. (iPhoto’s Smart Albums are case sensitive.) Usually what you’ll end up with, but you should definitely verify with your main library before you delete any of them, is a bunch of duplicate photos that have a match in your library and can probably be deleted. To delete the photos from your main library from within this Smart Album see How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

When I first created this Smart Album for my personal photo library of around 52,000 photos it filtered out little over 1,100 as duplicates. After going through each of them to verify that they were indeed duplicates I ended up being able to delete about 900 of them. Not too shabby.

Tweetie for Mac still has a few standout features that draw me to using it – but any software that runs on a public social service that isn’t updated in months tends to fall behind rather quickly. Echofon keeps up.

To keep my build of Chromium up-to-date I use Techcrunch’s Chrome-Up application built by MG Siegler and Greg Rosen.

Now that an official release of Chrome for Mac is out there it is being evaluated by some of the Macintosh community. John Gruber recently linked to someone who had tried Chrome for a week before it actually stuck. I can see why – switching browsers from Safari to Chrome won’t win you any new features. In fact, it may even force you to give up a few. But what makes Chrome better than any other browser on the Macintosh, at least for me, is pure foot-to-the-floor speed.

There are a few neat features, for sure. The “New Tab” page, arguably not as nice as Safari’s Top Sites feature, makes it pretty simple to set up a good way to get to what you want. Bookmark sync is nice. Extensions, I think, will play a huge roll in the success of Chrome – especially when it is pitted against Safari. Google has taken the right path with Extensions and how you build them, too.

But that’s about it. Here’s the one-liner for Chrome; it is really fast. Everything else is gravy.

Update May 20, 2011: It turns out that Tomlinson’s website is down. So, here is a brief synopsis of what you can do to add this functionality to your Mac.

• Open Terminal
• In terminal, enter: open .profile
• Add the following lines of code
  # TextMate
  # set path and simple shell function
  export TEXTMATE_PATH=/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate
  mate () {
  $TEXTMATE_PATH $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6
  }
  # svn for TextMate (default editor, end-of-line types)
  export EDITOR="$TEXTMATE_PATH -w"
  export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

  # Coda
# set path
export CODA_PATH=/Applications/Coda.app
# function roughly like 'mate .' by expanding '.' to '*.htm*'
coda () {
if [[ "." == $1 ]]
then
open -a $CODA_PATH *.htm*
else
open -a $CODA_PATH $1 $2 $3
fi
}

• Save .profile
• Quit Terminal
• Restart Terminal

There is also a slightly more robust script written for Coda by Aditya Bhargava that handles a few more tidbits and it is available on GitHub.

In late August I opened iChat, as I typically do, only to see that no one was online. Having quite a few people in my buddy list this makes for a strange occurrence. I rarely see an empty buddy list. A few hours go by and I check it again, still – no one. After a little bit of investigation I determined that my buddy list simply hadn’t loaded correctly. Since this has happened in the past I decided to go offline, quit iChat, and start over.

That didn’t help. I decided to try to View -> Show Offline Buddies. Sure enough, all of my contacts where showing up offline. I asked Eliza if she was online, and she was, so I quickly deleted her from my buddy list, added her back – and she then showed up as being online. I thought that too was odd but I was happy to get it working again. I quickly went through a handful of contacts that I normally use AIM to chat with, deleted them, and added them back in((This process isn’t too difficult since iChat stores buddy information in the Mac OS Address Book.)).

Later I signed off of iChat and went on with my day. The next time I started iChat. Same thing happened again, even with the contacts that I had added back using the delete-add-again method. Weird.

Now it was time to get out the shovel.

A Google search or three later I found other people that had experienced similar problems. Some of them solved their issue by logging in and out of AIM a few times and poof, their buddy list returned. Others used the method I described above and the changes held. Others still completely “reinstalled” iChat by removing all of their accounts, preference files, and other related files and starting from scratch. I tried all of these solutions and still no dice.

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and so I thought there would be a good chance that the upgrade to a new version of iChat would hopefully help my situation. So I deleted everything related to iChat, upgraded to Snow Leopard, and hoped for the best. Again, it didn’t work.

So, I’m down to the point now where I believe that my account at AOL is somehow messed up. I am not sure where to go from here besides trying to contact someone on the AIM team. If you are on the AIM team, and you’re reading this, you can contact me and let me know how to fix this – and I will be grateful.

As it stands Safari is far and away the best browser available on the Macintosh. Firefox, which is a really solid browser and is much loved by many developers, just isn’t “Mac enough” for us real, devout Mac users. There are so many things missing when an application is not built as a native Macintosh application. Simple things, really. Being able to look up things from the built-in Mac OS X dictionary is one thing. Native spell check. Speed! These are simple things, since Firefox handles some of these things on its own, but once you’ve grown accustomed how real, native Mac applications feel – you want that from all applications on your Mac. Opera and Camino, both very respectable browsers, just are not as lean and mean as Safari is. The are other browsers, to be sure, but none that are backed by corporations with enough resources, or an active enough development community, to really push for the top-spot on the Mac.

Which is why it’d be great for a really, really good browser to emerge on the Macintosh to rival Safari. Both Safari and the Webkit teams are on a tear lately. They have made tremendous strides towards making Safari better and Webkit (along with Squirelfish which is now called Nitro) much, much faster. They’ve improved Webkit’s page rendering (or, how it displays the page based on open standards) to such a degree that it is the envy of all other engines. But, they could do better.

For example, Chrome renders pages faster than Safari. I don’t need a fancy graph or test to show me this – I’ve loaded pages on my Macbook Pro using Chrome and the speed at which the page becomes usable is hands-down much, much faster in Chrome than in Safari (and Safari is fast).

For example, Firefox has add-ons which enhance the features of the core browser. There are add-ons for everything like plugging into your favorite Web sites, aggregating content, security and privacy enhancements, music, calendaring, etc. etc. etc. All optional, based on your needs/wants. Chrome will also support extensions, which are similar to add-ons, that will use open standards (this excites me very, very much).

Competition. That is what it comes down to. Not just competition based on marketing or market share or even mindshare – but an all-out race to be the best. The unequivocal best even if you’re not the biggest. If Google Chrome for Mac is released and is only marginally better than the developer preview releases I’ve been using – the people that are responsible for making Safari will need to trot a little quicker to keep up with where Google is going.

Hooray for us.

Side note: Why I can’t use Google Chrome full time, yet

I’d be tempted to use the developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac full time but there are a few key things that are ultimately missing from the application that are vital to my daily browsing needs. Here they are, in case you’re wondering:

• Adobe Flash support is simply not yet available. I’m not sure what makes Google Chrome for Mac any different than any other browser but I’m hoping this is addressed soon.
• Google Gears support. Both Google Reader and WordPress, two applications that I use quite often, support Gears and make the experience of using them much nicer. Kind of ironic that Google Chrome for Mac still doesn’t have Google Gears support.
• Import from Safari. I could probably hack my way into bringing all of my bookmarks and preferences from Safari into Google Chrome – but I hope that an upcoming release has this built-in.

That’s really about it. If I had these things I could probably make the jump to do some real testing of Google Chrome for Mac. For now, I’ll stick with the best browser available for the Mac, Safari.

Fever is a download-and-install Web-based feed reader that has a “what’s hot” twist. Keeping up with a lot of feed subscriptions is a challenge and so Shaun has created a process that looks at the popularity of the topic being written about and gives you the ability to sort things to catch up with “What’s hot” right now quickly. He seems to keep referring to it as a local-Digg, though it is more like a local-Trending. Fever is also a full featured feed reader so if you just want to sit down with a cup of coffee and read your friend’s blogs – you can do that too.

I love the idea. I am not sure exactly what Fever is doing to enable the Fever-hot list, but I suppose that is the secret sauce of this entire thing, but if it works well then he’s got a hot ticket on his hands here. I’m looking forward to one day giving it a spin. The demo video on the site is wholly impressive.

The only gripe I have is that in a world of Web services, which I’m getting more and more in love with over time, Fever is a PHP/MySQL download and install type application. Some may love this, some may not. The installation looks a little tough for the average user. If Shaun partnered with someone to make this a Web service that he could charge for, (and he’s usually partnered with our mutual friends at Media Temple for stuff like this), I think this would have been a much bigger deal and had a broader audience.

That being said, he has a user base of Mint customers that he can sell against. If you can download and install Mint, you can download and install Fever, and that might be more than enough for Shaun to call Fever a huge success.

Today Apple released the third version of their iPhone OS aptly named iPhone OS 3.0. This release boasts several improvements and new features – however, not all of them are available on the first-generation iPhone.

But, lets stay positive. So, what do you get if you upgrade your first-generation iPhone to the latest version of the OS? Here’s a list.

What you will actually get with iPhone OS 3.0 on the original iPhone

• Spotlight search: In a search screen to the left of your first home screen there is now a new search box that searches your entire iPhone including music, contacts, email, etc. It works great. Just like the update to Spotlight in Leopard changed the way I used my computer I believe the addition of Spotlight on my iPhone will change the way I find, use, and open things on my iPhone.
• Cut, Copy and Paste: Something that has been missing from the iPhone since the very first day but now seems so at home and well done. Copying text, photos, URLs, addresses, just about anything – from any app, and pasting into any application. Everyone knew Apple could pull this off better than anyone else and they have.
• A new Messages app: The SMS application has been replaced with the new Message application that handles MMS messages. This will allow the sending of audio, photo, and text messages. I say will because for those of us in the US and using AT&T, MMS isn’t yet supported. There are several other additions to this application, however, with much it a much more well rounded application overall. Two quick examples are the new way it sends messages without stopping you from moving onto something else and the ability to delete individual messages rather than just clearing the entire conversation.
• Voice memos: An application that I’m sure will come in handy (though you could have purchased or downloaded a number of applications that have been available through the App Store that do something similar) where you can quickly record some audio and email it (and soon MMS it) to anyone. I’d be willing to bet the utility of this application will come with time.
• Note syncing: Although notes now sync through iTunes they are unfortunately synced with Mail.app only (I’d rather them be in a directory in my Documents directory). I don’t use Mail.app so I am not sure how this will help me right now. I’ve been waiting for this, again, since iPhone OS 1.0 and am now disappointed in its implementation.
• Shake to shuffle: Open iTunes, play a song, shake your phone, and iTunes will randomly choose another song from your iPhone to play. Simple, fun.
• iTunes Store and App Store updates: You can now buy and rent movies and TV shows directly from your iPhone. The App Store application has a few updates as well including the ability to redeem applications (or credit from gift cards) (perhaps for beta testing purposes for applications). It also has a much improved interface for showing the screenshots from an application.
• The smaller updates: Several smaller updates like speed improvements, bug fixes, a few aesthetic things (like icons), and improvements like showing the phone number type (mobile or home) and location (city, state) in the Recents menu on the Phone application are among them. These are the types of updates that go mostly unnoticed by news outlets but those of us that use our iPhones for hours a day will thoroughly enjoy.

I think I covered most everything. iPhone OS 3.0 is a very, very big release for the iPhone OS and so there are a vast number of improvements that I simply could not list here.

What you do not get with iPhone OS 3.0 on the original iPhone

There are several things that you do not get with the update. I won’t list the things you don’t get due to not having the new lens, or magnometer such as focusing, and the compass related features, etc.

• Internet Tethering: Even though AT&T hasn’t enabled tethering via the iPhone yet, same as with MMS, this will never be available for the first generation iPhone. From what I’ve read it seems a limitation based on the EDGE antenna built into the iPhone.
• Voice Controls: Presumably due to resource limitations on the iPhone, Voice Controls are not available on the first-generation iPhone. The iPhone 3G, which shares nearly the same specs as the original iPhone, also does not support this feature. Which I find sort of odd. The Google Mobile App uses similar technology of voice recognition (and it even sends the data to the Web for interpretation) and it works just fine on my iPhone. I see two reasons for this being excluded: 1. Apple wants something even more to juice up the iPhone 3G S’s offering. Which this certainly does. 2. The Voice Controls applications does all of the interpretation on the iPhone itself instead of sending it to the service like Google’s application does and so it really is a restriction of the hardware in the iPhone and iPhone 3G.
• Video recording and editing: Although the new video recording capabilities are not solely based on the new lens in the iPhone 3G S the ability to record, playback, and edit the video are probably the result of the new hardware (ie. CPU, and RAM) in it.
• MMS: Thanks, or I should say no thanks, to Jacob Burke for letting me know that MMS will not be available on the original iPhone. This is, by far, the most disappointing thing that will not be available. Now I’m bummed.

That about wraps it up. The iPhone OS 3.0 update is extremely well done and a much appreciated update from Apple for all iPhone and iPod touch owners. I’m very much looking forward to updating my iPhone to the iPhone 3G S in the future and enjoying the things I’m missing now.

If you have an iPhone 3G and are wondering what you’ll get from this update, Apple has create a page just for you (hat tip: Mike Stickel).

If I missed something, and I’m sure I did, please be sure to make me aware of it via the comments and I’ll update the post promptly.

Photo credit: Erik Kastner

“We apologize for problems that iPhone and iPod touch Twitterrific users are currently experiencing due to the so-called Twitpocalypse.”

Ugh. Well, that saved me the time of writing up a bug report. But now I know it will be a little while before I can use my favorite Twitter application on the iPhone.

Update: At some point on Sunday evening an update to Twitterrific 2 for the iPhone and iPod touch had been approved through the App Store and is available through normal app updating methods. Seems to work peachy now.

Mike Rundle, whom I had the extreme pleasure of working with at 9rules, is – and I have absolutely no reservations about saying this out loud – one of the very best designers I will ever work with. He also doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with regards to programming. And he’s done just that with Beak – his foray into developing software for the Macintosh (which is, I think, exactly what he should be doing).

Beak is a simple, yet relatively full-featured Twitter application for the Macintosh that has Mike’s visual tastes dripping all over it. The icons in the application, as an example, could be picked out as Mike’s work from a hundred yards.

One of the differentiators that Beak has going for it, over any of the other Twitter applications I’ve used for the Mac, is the “Stats” tab. Mike chose to use the URL shortener Idek.net, which has a nice, clean, simple API, that allows him to show the number of click thrus on a URL that you’ve shortened from within Beak itself. I think this is both genius and handy. While Tweetie supports all of the URL shortening services I could ever want (and photo posting services too), it doesn’t support showing the statistics of those clicks nor does it even connect me to my account on said URL shorteners (neither does Beak, but at least I can easily check the stats tab).

There are several other nits that Mike has, no doubt pain stakingly [sic], poured over, refined, and included in the first version of this application. Profile pop-up boxes, in-line replies and retweets, and support for multiple accounts all seem like things that someone who was taking the easy way would have left out.

This is still “beta” software people. But I’m very much looking forward to what Mike ends up with before hitting 1.0 and even more looking forward to seeing what he does for his next trick in the world of Mac applications.

Reading his review, albeit late and after an update has already been released for it, has inspired me to dive into the application a little more fully. I’ve found even more than I thought was there before. Tweetie is a fantastic Twitter application for the Mac.

Tweetie for Mac, which I’ve been using all morning, allows for multiple accounts, posting from the browser, auto URL shortening, and much more. Although it feels like 1.0 it is certainly a well polished 1.0. Looking forward to watching this application mature.

I’m spoiled by a rich-editor in WordPress, that saves drafts automatically and even has multiple revisions, and so I’m sticking with WordPress for now. But if I was going to use an application to write with – it’d be MarsEdit.

Oh, and the latest version supports Tumblr now. Which is excellent.

Glims for Safari is a input-manager hack (I think) that enables a few ‘nice to have’ features. First, it adds favicons to tabs. I am not sure about you, but the new tabs (when you have a lot of them) are really hard to tell one from another. This helps. It also does things like add thumbnails to search results and makes the search history/recommendations look like Inquisitor a bit.

I might give this a spin.

Source: Glims for Safari.
Via: Shaun Inman.

I’m a tagging freak. I believe tags are the best way to help organize data into miscellaneous piles of information. It gives us a non-hierarchical (that isn’t a word, is it?) way that we can search for things later. Yes, I’ve read Dave Weinberger‘s book Everthing is Miscellaneous. I told you; tagging freak.

Apple has, in their own way, provided support for tagging in Mac OS X. They have a field in their metadata for files called “Spotlight comments”. Or, ‘the words you’d like to use to search for this file using Spotlight’. So if I have a document that, for whatever reason, is about my cats Pickles and Pookers but – somehow – does not mention them inside of the file by name or in the filename itself, I can add “Pickles Pookers” to the Spotlight comments area and presto! – I can search Spotlight for either of their names and find the file.

Magic.

Tags, on the other hand, adds a certain UI to this process that I think Apple should have done from the very beginning. From inside of any Applescript-enabled application (which is a lot of applications) you can invoke a UI to help you add some tags to that file. You can do this in Mail.app, Finder, inside of iPhoto, and even on bookmarks within Safari. Then, you can do specific searches in Spotlight later for those tags. The screencast on the home page for Tags does a good job of explaining what the application does and what it allows you to accomplish.

Source: Tags | Overview.

Caius, of Random Genius, recently published some of these hidden preferences including:

• A way to restore the old tab bar.
• Turning off the auto-complete search bar.
• Removing Coverflow.
• …and much more.

I am not sure why you’d want to change some of these preferences (as I feel they are some of the best features of the new version of Safari), but they are there, you can if you want, and Caius shows you how.

Source: Safari 4 Hidden Preferences.

The gameplay is great. The game has no “controller” interface, as with most well-done iPhone games, but there is an amazing attention to detail in Rolando. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch – this is a game that I highly recommend you buy immediately.

Source: Rolando.

Which is a great thing to see!

So, I’m both sick of waiting and terribly excited to take advantage of the offerings that WordPress 2.7 brings to the table – so much so that I’ve now upgraded my site to the latest version – which is 2.7 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate. This means that the software I’m running is, in the minds of the developers, ready to be used by the masses. It is – more than likely – the exact code that will be released as an official update to the WordPress software.  The only reason the code will be updated from RC1 is if anything rather high-priority is found (like a bug or security issue).

Upgrading to RC1 was painless (I came from version 2.6.3 I believe). I’m looking forward to fully kicking the tires on this new release and writing up a general review of my thoughts on this latest release. First impressions are incredibly positive.

Reading the changelog you can see that this is a fairly large release when you weigh it against previous versions. You can also see that it has been one of the longest periods of time between releases. This is most likely due to Todd Ditchendorf, the developer of Fluid, taking on the much more challenging task of creating a full-fledged Web browser called Cruz.

On the Fluid blog Todd mentions that “This release incorporates most of the features and fixes that went into Cruz 0.1…”. That makes me happy, since I’m not a big fan of Cruz, but am a big fan of Fluid. At least the work Todd is doing on Cruz doesn’t mean that Fluid is being left behind. Kudos to him for developing in this manner.

Source: Fluid.

I’m all for independent developers charging for their applications. In fact, I don’t mind really good indy devs to charge a premium for their product if they’re going to do their best to support their customers and build a great product.

I do mind when applications that cost money, which include a trial, do not really offer much of a trial at all.

Acquisition 2, a P2P and BitTorrent application, is probably the worst possible example of how I think developers should try to get people to purchase their applications. As irony would have it, Acquisition is an application most-often-used to steal applications, music, videos, etc. but that is besides the point.

While most application trials last for 30-days, Acquisition’s lasts for 1 hour. In fact, it doesn’t even last that long. The trial version of the application severely limits the use of the application in several ways. The unregistered version of Acquisition states that “search results [are] ignored randomly”. So you can never really tell how good Acquisition is at finding what it is you’re trying to download. After an hour Acquisition throttles the bandwidth that it uses for downloads. In my experience this limit is set to just under 10Kbps. Acquisition also shows you an “nag screen” ((A screen that asks you to purchase the application.)) that you can not hide even if you hide the application itself. It is a floating “window” that will not go away so long as you have the application open. These are thing things I found in my usage before turning the application off and uninstalling it.

Some trial.

While Eliza was painting our living room we had to unplug our Tivo so I needed to find the latest episode of Heroes. BitTorrent, my usual method for downloading TV Shows when things like this happen, wasn’t working for reasons I’ve yet to figure out. So, I thought I’d give Acquisition a trial.

To be clear; Acquisition is a very well designed application. Dave Wantanabe is a very good developer and has a few successful projects under his belt. I just think the unregistered version of this application is a bit too annoying for my tastes. It isn’t a question of quality, it is a question of methodology.

I am not sure what the solution to this problem actually is. My best guess would be to offer a real trial of the software, without any limitations whatsoever, for at least a few days. Then show the nag screen. Then, maybe, limit the software’s ability to download things quickly.  Having it not find the files you’re looking for makes the application seem crippled, not limited.

Versions has now come out of beta though and is considered stable enough for sale. Version 1.0 is ~$49 USD.

Source: Versions.

“So that’s it. Before you even get into the technical merits of the platforms, think about the license, especially if you’re a theme developer. Slapping a Creative Commons license on your theme will work just fine for Habari. Doing it for WordPress is a violation of their license.”

He says this because WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License that states that if you create a work that contains any part of WordPress it must “be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”. Which is pretty much anything built “on top” of WordPress, right?  Plugins, themes, small widgets, all have WordPress’ built-in functions in them.

Should this be a real cause for concern? Owen thinks so.  There is some interesting chatter in the comments of his post too.

Source: One Way in which Habari Absolutely Slaughters WordPress.

Google’s Chrome, the new Web browser by Google, has been getting a lot of attention because of its simple approach to browsing the Web.  But there is more here than meets the eye. It is all about the approach.

The new application has its flaws, for sure, but what it gets wrong it makes up for in what it gets right.  Google has long been an advocate of speed.  ”Speed is a feature.”  Many other browser manufacturers, namely Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have continuously strived to push the needle on speed, faster page loading time, and overall memory usage of their software products. They’ve done this while also trying to jam more features into the browser.  What they’ve ultimately failed to do though, is what Google succeeded at; removing the application from the application.

Google’s approach here is interesting.  This is the first real step towards making the Web the application, and the browser just the “thing” that loads it into view.  Over on Daring Fireball John Gruber quoted this bit, which I find really interesting:

“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.”

You know how the iPhone or iPod touch loads web applications with nearly no UI unless you scroll up?  That is sort of the approach that Google Chrome is taking.  Just render the page in an insanely fast and stable way – that is the goal.

Is Google Chrome a “Single Site Browser” the way the next version of Safari is going to be or the way that Fluid already is?  Sort of.  In the “Page control” menu (not sure I like that name either) there is an option to “Create application short cuts”.  You can install these shortcuts on your Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch bar.  Personally I think it would have been neat if they automatically asked to setup Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, etc. when I installed – but everyone knows that they would have caught some serious heat for that if they did.  For those of us liking the SSB experience, Google Chrome works.

It is tough to say what Google Chrome “gets wrong”.  I’ve seen reports of various rendering problems, but I don’t think that is something Chrome got wrong.  That is fairly easily fixed in the next version so long as they iron out their use of Webkit.

To sum up; the approach Google is taking here is refreshing.  Clean, simple, and fast. A feature for feature comparison of Google Chrome against any browser would not be a fair way to gauge its affect on the marketplace.  Time will tell.

Now, when they release a Macintosh version, then I’ll really kick the tires.

“Since installing the app, I find myself reading news a lot more in bed, before I get up in the morning. I roll over, grab my iPhone (which is sitting on the nightstand because I used a podcast to help me fall asleep) and start rocking and rolling with the days’ news. By the time I actually get out of bed, I’ve already made a sizable dent in my feeds. This works only because the app is not annoying; indeed, it’s quite a joy to use.”

It should be noted that Justin does not use NetNewsWire on his Macintosh.  He and I share a love for Google Reader although we both have a lot of experience with NetNewsWire on the Mac.

Currently I don’t read any feeds on my iPhone. I have dabbled with Google Reader’s iPhone interface, but found it really hard to breeze through quickly for a number of reasons. However, his fairly thorough review of NetNewsWire for the iPhone makes me want to give it a try.

He is, as far as I can tell, omitting a huge caveat to using NetNewsWire for the iPhone and Google Reader on the Mac. Syncing.  If I read something on NetNewsWire, on my iPhone, in bed – will I have to read that same post again when I pull up Google Reader at my desk?  That’d suck.

Source: I ♥ NetNewsWire (on the iPhone).

Due to this barrage of updates yesterday’s release of Firefox 3.0 may just seem like another run-of-the-mill update to one of the applications on your computer.  I assure you this just isn’t so.

Sometimes the beginning is the best place to start. Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, started out as a project within the Mozilla corporation, then named Pheonix, to battle against the feature creep that was happening with the Mozilla Suite of applications.  Do you remember when Mozilla was a huge download with tons of “applications” within one application?  Well, that was why Firefox was originally branched off into its own application, to deal with that bloat.

But, we can go back even farther than that.  Instead of reiterating what is already out there I recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on Mozilla Firefox (which leads to many, many pages of information) as well as watching a video that Andy Baio recently shared called Code Rush.  Code Rush is a documentary that aired on PBS about Netscape opening the source of their browser, calling it Mozilla.

After reading through, and watching the documentary on, the information and history of Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Mosaic you just can’t help but feel that a little bit of history was written over the last few days while millions upon millions of copies of the Firefox 3.0 browser has been downloaded from the Mozilla Web site.

So while you download your copy ((The Mozilla Web site is nearly unreachable because of the attention that Firefox 3.0 is getting.  I recommend waiting a day or two before giving it a try.)), install the software, and use it to view Web pages – realize that thousands of people and years worth of history are behind the application you are using.

Update: Also worth watching is a Google Talk by Mike Pinkerton who was on the original Netscape team and now manages the Camino project at Mozilla.  Found via Andy Baio’s comment thread on Code Rush.

Weighing in at a 13.7mb zip file this update has been one I’ve anticipated for a very long time.  Upon launching Delicious Library 2 I was prompted to update my OS to the latest version.  I didn’t even know I wasn’t running the latest version!  I’m guessing the Delicious Monster crew had to wait until 10.5.3 was released to get this out.

I’ll write more about Delicious Library 2 later – for now, just go grab a copy.

Source: Delicious-Monster.com

Update 8:56am EST:  Turns out that Wil may have jumped the gun here.  According to Software Update, 10.5.3 hasn’t been fully baked yet, or at least it hasn’t been released yet.  It doesn’t appear on the Apple downloads site for Mac OS X updates yet either.

“With creative features rivaling ‘Pro’ applications, while retaining plasq’s signature ease-of-use, Comic Life Magiq is a Quantum Evolution of Comic Life.”

I’m downloading the trial right now to give it a spin.  I’m fairly confident Eliza would like to get her hands on Comic Life Magiq to create some really neat photo projects.

Video demonstration of Comic Life Magiq

Source: Comic Life Magiq.
Related:  Other posts tagged with plasq.

(Source: “C4[1] Sasser: Coda Confidential”)

After lunch I decided to switch from Thincloud’s Twitter application to Hahlo and give it a whirl. Hahlo is great. It is quick, easy, and does nearly everything I need to interact with Twitter* and does it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I highly recommend using Hahlo.

Onto the Safari mobile bug. If you click a link in a tweet it will open a new tab in Safari mobile with that URL loaded in it. This is exactly as it should happen, because you wouldn’t want to have to navigate back to Hahlo. However, if you close the tab that it opened, Safari will replace Hahlo with the last tabs URL. This gets to be pretty annoying and I’ve found it happening in other applications besides Hahlo.

I have yet to figure out a sure-fire way to reproduce this in a consistent way and I can’t seem to find a pattern for successful opening and closings of tabs. But I can say this; this bug happens just about every single time a tinyURL is involved.

I’ve emailed Dean Robinson, lead developer of Hahlo, and he’s looking into it. I’ve also described the bug and submitted it to Apple Support.

Has anyone else seen this? Can you figure out why this is? Secondly, John Gruber recently stated that he’s finding the latest version of the iPhone’s software to be buggier than the previous – and I agree with him.

* By “nearly” I mean that Hahlo doesn’t yet have the ability to “friend” someone. Seems a little odd but Dean has assured me that it is in an upcoming release. Gauging from the work Dean has done so far on Hahlo – I’m sure it will be worth the wait.

Something I was worried about with Eliza and I both getting iPhones was syncing. She has data, I have data, we have data! How would I be able to manage keeping all of this data in sync between our two computers and the iPhones without forcing her to only sync her iPhone with my computer?

A few things came into play in order to make this happen – but out of the box I’m very happy with how the iPhone handles syncing. Unlike the iPod, and correct me if I’m wrong, the iPhone allows itself to be connected to more than one computer. Have you ever had an iPod yell at you when you connect it to another computer? The iPhone doesn’t. Which is beautiful! So now my iPhone syncs only with my computer whereas Eliza’s syncs with mine for music and her’s for mail, calendar, address book, and photos. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

However, this introduces a small wrench into the system. Syncing our iPhones separately would mean that we would have to manage two different address books and calendars. The address book is a non-issue since Eliza and I, for the most part, managed two very separate contact lists. The number of business contacts that I have makes it so that Eliza would not want to sync with my address book outright. I, on the other hand, want all of my contact’s information available to me all the time.

So we’re left with the calendar. How do I sync Eliza’s calendar with mine, mine with hers, and both of ours with our iPhones? Turns out this is made very easy using a utility called Spanning Sync. So here is how I do keep all of this information up-to-date between both of our computers, the Web, and our respective iPhones.

Syncing bliss. (made with Skitch)

The first step is to create the calendars that you think you need within iCal. I decided to create two calendars per person and one joint calendar for our use. So we both have a personal calendar and a work calendar, and then we share a family events calendar. Eliza maintains the family events calendar so that I don’t have to (thanks babe!).

The second step is to recreate those same calendars within Google Calendar. I could have easily set it up so that Spanning Sync used the same Google Calendar account, but I wanted to keep our two accounts separate for other reasons and I really think this is the better option if Eliza wanted to go into Google Calendar and subscribe to things like the Green Bay Packers season schedule or something.

Once you have this completed you tell Spanning Sync, on both computers, to sync the iCal calendars that you created with their online representatives within Google Calendar. This will pull your information from iCal every hour, day, or week and sync it with Google Calendar making them both up-to-date.

The final step is to share my calendars with Eliza through Google Calendar and share her’s with mine. Then, ask Spanning Sync to sync those calendars too with offline representatives within iCal.

Once I had this workflow down, and have tested it, I have been really, really happy with the results. If I didn’t explain this too well I’m sorry – it gets a bit confusing but if you have any questions you can leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them. Or, if you have any tips on how I can improve this workflow – I’d like those as well.

Web applications are different then the applications you run on your computer in two very specific and obvious ways. First, they are run completely in your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.) and you do not need to download or install any local files for the application to function. Second, the data that the application stores or edits is not on your local machine but rather saved “on the Internet”. These may seem like very obvious differences but I’ve mentioned these two reasons because the paradigm has shifted overtime and Google Gears almost completes that shift.

One of the many mantras of “Web 2.0″ applications has been to freely allow users of these applications to have access to their data both via an API and being able to “export” their data into various formats. These APIs afforded many developers to blur the line between desktop and web applications – such as being able to geotag your photos in iPhoto using Google Maps – but these solutions still required an Internet connection for them to work properly. Something also to note is the fact that these APIs are mainly used by developers and not by the users themselves so even though the data was portable, this fact hasn’t been exploited by the average user much, yet.

Enter Google Gears – which provides developers with the needed technology to make their entire applications portable not just the data. The first example Google chose to show off Gears with is Google Reader (a really great example). Google Reader, up until a few days ago, was a way to read your favorite sites by subscribing to their feeds but its use was limited to when you were connected to the Internet. Google Gears allows you to use Google Reader, at least most of the application, offline. You connect to the Internet, download your latest feed subscription’s updates, get offline, and you’re still able to read the feeds that you’ve cached on your local system. What’s more is that you are able to flag those items and Google Reader will sync with your Google Reader account once an Internet connection is available.

In short; Google Gears brings your favorite web applications to your local computer and allows them to run almost like desktop applications.

Why am I excited? Because my main reason for not using some of the most popular web applications has been because I can not use them offline. I am a firm believer in having all of my data available to me at anytime. Unfortunately in some cases, such as my photo and music libraries becoming larger than my laptop’s hard drive, I’ve had to make sacrifices. However, when it comes to much smaller yet more important pieces of data such as email messages, bookmarks, and important documents I can not afford to make those sacrifices. As Google Gears is adopted and implemented in more web applications I’ll be able to begin using them offline.

On Friday I had gone to a friend’s house before heading to a concert with some friends (photo and video). For whatever reason the bandwidth had been horrible and I was unable to publish the featured video for two days in a row (they got saved as drafts ?).

The reason I’m putting this out here as public knowledge is because I wanted to say sorry to the two users that would have gotten much more exposure for their videos if I hadn’t messed up (I’ve messaged them). So I’m sorry to realmacsoftware who shared their RapidWeaver videos with the Viddler community in order to promote their product. Definitely take the time to view the RapidWeaver Quick Start Guide and take a look at their software as it seems very well thought-out and intuitive. I plan on downloading a trial and giving it a try this week. I’m also sorry to entr200 who gave us all a great tip on how to get a wine cork out of a bottle.

I’m hoping to setup a slightly better system where I’m 24 hours ahead of the game so that I am able to plan for outages, vacations, and even have Rob feature a few videos when I’m not around.

Be sure to subscribe to the Viddler blog so that you can see what videos are being featured. I’m really proud of all the great content that the Viddler community is sharing on a daily basis.

Turns out I did learn a few things from the conversations this post, and the Apple discussion board post, that I created. But, nothing that came through those channels provided me with the solution I needed.

But I lucked out! I was digging through some old backups and I found that I backed up my photo library just before switching to Aperture on February 12th of this year. All I needed to do was open the backup, import any photos I took since that day, and move some libraries around and poof! I’m back in iPhoto and loving it.

As I stated, and before anyone gets a little woozy about using Aperture for their photo cataloging needs, the only reasons I am switching back are mentioned in this post. Nothing more. I really like Aperture but I can not deal with those two caveats (unfortunately). I look forward to giving Aperture, or perhaps Lightroom, another look in the future.

“We spend a lot of time on the web. We’re building software that makes people spend even more time on the web. Let’s make it a nicer place to be. Add some social grease to your next app and make your users feel appreciated[.]” — Lachlan Hardy

He gives a few great examples of how this is already being done by some of the social leaders in our industry. And I think he makes a really great point when he says: “This is not a technical issue! It’s one of priorities, focus and intent. Most applications don’t have any development time focused specifically on being nice to people, but doesn’t that sound like a great way to build your community?”.

One thing I’m striving for at Viddler is keeping my ear firmly pressed to the ground in order to find out what Viddlers want, even if they don’t let us know directly. For example, they might tell the Twitterverse and it may not even be related to Viddler itself. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to accommodate the simple, valid features that our users would love to have.

This is extending the “nice” features into “having the features your users want the most”. Perhaps Viddler would do well to listen to Mr. Hardy – and have a few more “nice” features thrown into the mix. I’ll be looking into this more this week to see how we can improve how nice we are.

Thanks for the advice Lachlan!

Pickles inspecting the floor

After the cats approved of our floors, we put them away. Now I’m just waiting to do one final sweep and mop before we start putting on the coats of wax.

9:48 AM – What do you do when you’re waiting to wax the floor? Tag photos in iPhoto of course. I’m still playing catch-up on this front and I have a little over 8,500 photos that still need tagging. At least 15,000 that still need to be cataloged by event. And over 20,000 that need to be rated. Have you caught up?

9:52 AM – A quick question for all of you. I just came across roughly 1,000 photos that have the wrong date/time from the camera. This may have happened because the camera was set to 1/1/1999 for some reason after changing the batteries once. I am not sure exactly what date they were taken, but I’d really like to have them appear correctly chronologically.

What I’ve done, for now, is tag them with the keyword “wrongdate” so that I can get back to them later. Any ideas as to how best to figure out what date they were taken?

10:27 AM – My new way of getting caught up on assigning keywords to my photos has been tag layering. What I do is a first pass of tagging only people that appear in the photos. Then, I go back through and create albums for each “event”. Once that is done, I assign the appropriate geo tags, location tags, and even event tags.

I’ve found it is much more rewarding to do this in layers to help to keep moving forward, rather than only getting a few hundred photos done a day.

12:03 PM – Just finished mopping the entire floor. I did the best job I could, using Joy dish detergent (which is highly recommended to remove any oils from tile flooring), to make sure that the wax can make a good bond with the tile.

Now I’m just waiting for Mark (our friend who knows how to do this stuff) to get here so we can go pick up the materials needed to pull this off. What to do in the meantime?! *opens iPhoto again*

Rebuilding cache

12:16 PM – iPhoto has been asking me to rebuild my thumbnail cache for quite sometime, so I finally gave in and selected to allow it to go ahead and do just that. Maybe this will give me a little better performance. My main question I guess is why iPhoto doesn’t build thumbnails on import, and if it does, why does it need to rebuild the cache? Oh, and why can’t it be more like the way iMovie or iDVD handles video compression and rendering and build the thumbnail caches in the background while still allowing me to do other things within iPhoto? I mean, I have “two processors” do I not?

7:37 PM – Three coats, and one chinese buffet later, we’re done. Now we just have to let the last coat cure before we start putting everything back onto the tile. It looks good, and should do well to protect the floor for years to come.

[tags]photos, pickles, animals, cat, floor, wax, keywords, tagging, iphoto, apple, macintosh, applications, software[/tags]

In short, if you pull open a remote Library that you’d like to grab a few photos from, and use iPhoto’s built in calendar feature to filter that Library to a specific year/month – you will find it is impossible to drag those photos onto your local Library.

To restore the sharing ability, after having selected 142 photos in my case, I had to disable the calendar feature (by clicking the small X in the calendar) clicking on the main shared Library in the source, reselecting all of the photos I wanted, and dragging them onto my local Library.

Ugh. I might switch to Aperature sooner than later. But not until after I put it through the ringer to be sure that the main problems I’ve had with iPhoto do not exist also in Aperature.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, software, applications, sharing, bugs[/tags]