Category: Macintosh

An email from a BBEdit tech support dude:

‘Kevin, we will have a Carbon version of BBEdit available when Apple
ships Mac OS X (final, not beta) and this will be a free upgrade to
BBEdit 6.0.

As for beta testing, we generally cull beta sites from customers who
have regularly reported bugs in the shipping versions or provided other
substantive feedback on the software.’

Kinda sucks, but I hope this trend of free upgrades for Carbonized software continues. I could just see Adobe making you pay through the teeth for Photoshop 6.1 or something.

If you’re using MacOS X, and you’re a little unhappy with the default music player (I mean, it’s nice and all, but the playlist feature leaves a little to be desired), then I would recommend picking up PR2 of Audion from Panic. You can even use your current playlists (just drag ’em on the Audion icon in the Dock; don’t double-click them, or I’m assuming they’ll open in Classic, and no one wants that).

And as a sidenote, if anyone has heard of either Adobe of BareBones carbonizing their software, let me know.

Are you using MacOS X Public Beta yet? If not, then fucking start. And don’t give me any of that ‘But I’m on a PC’ crap. Go buy a $800 iMac and fucking install it.

But I digress. I just found a cool site: Xappeal.org. Despite the fact that it sounds a little like a porn site, it’s actually a place to get info on OSX, carbon, cocoa, and the like. I just downloaded a piece of software called ‘Fire’ that lets me use my AIM account to talk with not only other AIMers, but other IM client users as well. So I can use this carbonized software to talk to you on your ICQ client, for example, using my AIM screenname and password. It’s rad. It’s a little like Jabber, only it’s for Mac, and it works. Try it out. I dig it. The icons could use some work, though.

So Apple’s stock dropped 48% in morning trading today. So who fucking cares (I actually do care) ? Sorry to reiterate what 808 wrote yesterday but this gets me fucking going. The following quotes (of course from one source) are from an AP story that I am sure is being used by every fucking so-called journalists and form of media. These fuckers wouldn’t think of coming up with their own stories, now would they?

“We saw this coming,” said Steve Fortuna, a PC hardware analyst with Merrill Lynch. “We clearly were not pushing Apple stock with our clients and were recommending Gateway and Dell.”

Maybe if there was a “PC hardware analyst with Merrill Lynch” that advised their clients to buy Apple and not Gateway and Dell the world would be a better place.

“They had no real new products, tough comparisons, and a stale upgrade cycle,” he said.

Okay, they had no real new products, tough comparisons, and a stale upgrade cycle?!?! What the fuck!!!!!

Apple recently introduced a snazzy-looking Power Mac G4 Cube – a “nice machine but too expensive,” Fortuna said. “Most consumers are looking for a $899 PC at Best Buy and not a $1799 machine.”

Yah, most non-thinking asshole consumers that want a fucking shitty product will take a $899 PC at Best Buy and whatever crock of shit you feed them.

Sorry about the word fucking- but I like that word, it has feeling.

Ok, get this. I move from Colorado to Silicon Valley. I expect DSL to be like water out here (everywhere). I ordered DSL on August 10th and I still have not even heard back from either the local ISP or the major bell (PacBell). So, I decide lets call and see whats taking them. PacBell informs me that “most people wait 3-7 months for service, so you are doing quite well sir.” — uh, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? My answer to the operator was this “Are you especially proud of that? Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”


Damn, Fuck the phone companies.

Iomega introduced an mp3 player called the HipZip yesterday, and it’s not as cool as it could be. Basically, it acts as a drive on your machine, and when you unplug it, it can play the mp3s. The disks can hold up to 40MB, and can actually be used to store anything at all. My question is this: Why didn’t they just make it read the Zip 250 disks? You’d then have 250MB of space, more than just about any mp3 player on the market, it would boost sales of the struggling Zip 250 drives and disks… I would actually buy it. But they just make you buy all new technology, and it probably won’t last too long.

I don’t know how many of you have picked up the latest ‘Wired’ (the magazine, not the website), but there’s an article in particular that makes me a little frustrated. It’s called ‘GUIs Just Want To Have Fun,’ the photo accompanying which is a screenshot of a horrifically put together Litestep skin for Windows. The article proceeds to mention the following: NeoPlanet, Litestep, Darkstep, Winamp, Sonique, RealJukebox, Halflife, Skinz.org, the WinAqua skin that copied MacOS X before it was even beta, etc. What they failed to mention were the following: Kaleidoscope, Macast, Audion, etc. Despite the fact that Audion is the most advanced MP3 player on the market (at least, as far as skinning goes), for any OS, allowing use of alpha channels for shadows, transparencies, etc. There were some interesting quotes, however, regarding the problems with skinning from Mac guru Jef Raskin.

Needless to say, I was pissed. So here is the e-mail I promptly wrote them, in its entirety:

Being a Macintosh user, I’ve grown accustomed to having an elegant interface at my fingertips. When I came acros ‘GUIs Just Want To Have Fun,’ I anticipated an interesting read. Before diving into the article, however, I studied the photo (a screenshot of a Litestep-‘enhanced’ Windows desktop) long and hard. What I saw was a beautifully rendered but unusable interface that would drive me crazy if I had to use it for any length of time. What I found in the article was more of the same: a complete lack of interest in usability. What I also found was an almost incomprehensible lack of attention to the MacOS.

Kaleidoscope has been a staple control panel of Mac users for years, with thousands of schemes (skins, to you Windows users) available. Despite this fact, I find that shortly after I install a Kaleidoscope scheme, I often abandon it for the traditional Platinum MacOS look. Why? The people at Apple have spent years and millions of dollars researching usability and user experience. I’m not about to abdandon their results just because some jerk in his dorm room thinks the windows should look like they’re made of rusted metal. I highly doubt it’s a fluke that one of the most popular Windows skins is a knockoff of MacOS X. You know what? We’re the ones that actually get to use the OS, not just a skin of it.

I guess if I had to use Windows, I’d want to pile as much crap on top of it as I could, too. So nevermind. I get your point.

While I am not writing this from within IE5 for OSX, I should be. I have successfully installed and used OSX Public Beta. The best I can say: go fucking buy it or download it or get it any way you can. I would be using it as my only OS if I did not have to connect to NT Servers via Dave. It is a pleasure to use. I haven’t felt this way about a Mac OS since I first saw the ‘Switcher’ in System 7. The dock is awesome. The Finder is awesome (sort of, it takes some getting used to). The desktop does, however, need some work. Sometimes you have to log out and back in to see things in your desktop. Also, I downloaded OmniWeb, and it didn’t show up in the Finder right away. I had to do a Sherlock search to find it, and then open it OUT of Sherlock, because it wasn’t showing up in the Finder where Sherlock said it should have been. But hey. It’s a beta OS.

And it took 7 minutes (!) to install. UNIX BSD layer and all. Awesome. The entire setup process is a pleasure to go through, and the OS is beautiful. I really enjoy the graphite button option.

So, again. Get your own copy of it.