I always forget to announce such things beforehand, always constraining myself to a brief post facto summary of the event, but there’s an exciting hack-day going on in London at the end of March.
Nice article comparing and contrasting OpenDoc with iOS’s closed application system, and asking for the (sorely-needed) addition of a way of apps opening each other’s documents without using ‘the cloud.’
I could say so much good stuff about these. But it’s much better summed up by Dean Allen, via whom I found this. So I’ll link to him instead and you can follow through from there.
I’ve wanted for a while to be able to view the contents of a text clipping file on the command-line. With inspiration from some links sent to me by Grant Hutchinson and Brian Pink after my request on Twitter, I worked out how to do it with the DeRez command-line tool.
Really, this shouldn’t be necessary. There’s no reason that text clipping data should be stored in the resource fork. It should be as plain UTF-8 in the data fork, repeated in the resource fork for backwards-compatibility.
Before you really understand a technology, you have to understand why it is the way it is. Jeremy Keith helps us understand why HTML5 has worked out this way.
The first release of Frontispiece, my blogging engine, is now out. I’m looking for alpha testers and other developers to help me. There are a bunch of known issues with this release, so be careful using it.
A year ago, after nine months of procrastination, I made the first post on this weblog—then called ‘the Anthology of Hypertext’ which name was gradually dropped for being too pretentious. That first post is not fantastically well-written; I think my best content of that week was in the links I posted, which can’t be accessed through my archive for various reasons. I’ve changed publishing engine three times so far—from WordPress (blech) to Chyrp, and now to my own Frontispiece.
Transferring Open Tabs Between Safari for Mac and the iPhone
How to open all the tabs from a Safari window on the Mac on your iPhone.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily transfer all your open tabs in Safari over to the iPhone? You can do that with a pair of scripts I’ve written. Download them here. There’s an HTML file and a text file containing AppleScript source code. To set them up, either read the instructions below or watch this short video. Or do both. Your choice.
Copy the HTML file to your ~/Sites/ folder and turn on Web Sharing in System Preferences. Paste the script into the Script Editor, then compile and save it in the Safari scripts folder.
Visit http://computer.local/~user/browsersync.html on your iPhone, where computer is the name of your Mac and user is your username. Add it as a bookmark. (I would have made it a bookmarklet—indeed, I tried to—but the way the script works means that doing that would have violated AJAX’s same-origin security policy)
Next time you want to transfer tabs from Safari to the iPhone, pull your Safari window to the front and run the AppleScript from the Script Menu. (I described how to do all this in a post earlier this year.) Then, open the ‘Open URLs From My Mac’ bookmarkl and allow all the popup windows.
There is one caveat: you need to disable popup blocking in Mobile Safari’s preferences. However, Mobile Safari works slightly differently to its bigger desktop brother in that even when blocking is disabled, it offers to block each popup before it gets opened.
A new version of my favourite text editor. If you’re using TextMate for some reason, or haven’t jumped from the free TextWrangler, now is a great time to look at BBEdit.
Does Apple intend to close the Macintosh platform up? Or are they just trying to make it easier to switch to the Mac?
The Back to the Mac event had two messages: first that Apple has not lost interest in the Mac, and second that the future of Mac, at least short-term, is a UI convergence with the iOS.
The former obviously needed addressing. The hype surrounding the death of the Mac was frenzied before this event, but now it’s back to where it should be: something that will happen in the distant future, but not for a while yet.
The latter, on the face of it, is an excellent idea. The more the interface of OS X resembles that of the iOS, the easier it is for Windows-using iPhone owners to switch to the Mac. The UI becomes easier to demonstrate, and is more likely to provoke reactions of, ‘Oh, this works just like my iPhone—I already know how to use it.’
I think some people have interpreted the move entirely the wrong way, though. I’ve already heard plenty of reactions of “Apple wants to make the Macintosh into a closed platform like the iPhone or iPad.” The idea being that these changes to the Mac interface are the proverbial toe dipping in the water, making the Mac into a slightly less open platform.
If Apple thinks they can take away that developer freedom, they do a disservice to a very large portion of their user base. This doesn’t just mean people like me who install extra UNIX utilities, AppleScripts, and Services on our machines but people like professional Web designers who don’t want to jump through hoops just to find out the hexadecimal code for a colour.
These people don’t want to do anything nefarious with their computer—they want to get on with their damn work. Every second wasted trying to copy the currently selected colour with DigitalColor Meter is a second they can’t spend working.
Compare the iPad—there’s no facility to make a plugin for a system-wide element like the NSColorWell. You can’t make even a haxie to do it (without jailbreaking). I wouldn’t want either on my iPhone even if I could have them.
The point of the move to iOS-like interfaces on the Mac OS is because the iOS is incredibly usable. It’s a very obvious (and well-known) interface design. I don’t think Apple has any intention to prevent you from installing your own applications. I’ll be surprised if the apps in the Mac App Store are DRM-locked.
As for the MacBook Air, I think the new model is fantastic. The return made by the 11.6″ model to the old ‘small as we can get it with a full-size keyboard’ idea from the 12″ iBooks and PowerBooks is long-overdue. The move to the 1400×900 resolution on the 13″ model will hopefully be replicated in the MacBook and MacBook Pro with the next revisions.
The new MacBook Air really does take the best features of the iPad and move them to a Macintosh computer. One thing I’m not sure about is how cool it will run—I’ll be interested to see how good the he system is in the new Air, and if it really is almost silent and dead cold when running. I could believe the former, but I can’t see them getting the same low temperature out of a Core 2 that they get from the A4.
In short, the message of the event was a much-needed assertion that the Mac is still important to Apple, and to keep it important, Apple wants to spread ideas from the iOS over to the Mac. I don’t know whether they intend to introduce more Mac features over to the iOS, but it’s certainly interesting food for thought.
On Friday I was at the Hacks and Hackers Hack Day in Manchester. There isn’t really a lot to say because most of my work was in getting data from various sources into the right format for other people’s projects, but I did knock this together based on the GMP24 data.
I think for once we might be able to read something into the design of the invitation—we’re possibly going to see a preview of Mac OS X 10.7. Maybe I’ll also finally be right that they’ll call it Lion.
A neat little HTML5 trick to change the URL displayed in the address bar—for instance, if an AJAX event has changed the state of a page in a way that requires an new permalink to be shown—without reloading the page, and without using the ‘anchor hack.’ I’m surprised this isn’t being used in the new Twitter.
Good news. One of my main gripes about Textile was that it wasn’t easy to obtain except by extracting it from a download of Textpattern—hopefully this will change that. And of course, it means another component I don’t have to fuck around with maintaining for Frontispiece.
Very good thoughts. I was very young when we got the Internet at my house—we were among the first people in the UK to have a household Internet link—so perhaps I don’t quite understand the experience of growing up around the Internet and being introduced to it slowly over time.
I definitely don’t think ‘digital surveillance’—that is, using VNC and other technology to spy on children without their knowledge—is the right approach to it. The solution is accompanying children when they are using the computer and helping them along the way.
I’ve been talking about this on Twitter for a while now, but now the quote-unquote demo is looking fairly respectable, so I’ll post about it here too. Frontispiece is my new blogging engine. This page itself is rather boring, but if you’re into that sort of thing, you can go and inspect the source code at GitHub.