Leaving Las Vegas

Big changes coming soon… Won’t be in Las Vegas or Prepress soon, so I’ll have to find a new life for this blog.

On Palm and Newton: Interfaces and Workflows

I loath taking notes on dead-tree (Paper, Cotton, etc) because it means that I am wasting resources, and once you are using paper you are rather limited in what you can do with it.

Laptops tend to be too bulky or heavy to carry all the time, and they are not geared towards instant note-taking or quick jots. You are stuck using a keyboard/trackpad in mast cases too, which for sitting at the desk and pounding out text might be fine, but doesn’t gel well for most people when it comes to note-taking. No matter the (And we’ll come back to this) we tend to whip out a pad and paper if we go to a meeting, if someone drops by the cube with a request, or if we get info on the phone.

Enter the PDA. The idea is a smaller device, not a full fledged general purpose computer, but enough to do the tasks you need on the go.

I have used Palms in various incarnations for a while now, starting with a Handspring Visor, and evolving up to my most recent Tungsten E2. The Palm family use a semi-handwriting recognition system called Graffiti, which entails you learning a shorthand like writing system, and which you write letter be letter over the same space. Their workspace starts with you looking at a simple, single-tasked, icon based application launcher, and a number of pre-installed applications for various tasks. There is a huge variety of 3rd party applications available and a thriving development community, especially in the shareware space. But it is very much centered on the concept of the programs doing all the lifting, and no single program as a center. With more recent devices, you can add a huge variety of other functions to a palm device too: games, emulators, etc. Unfortunately none of that really adds to what a PDA should really be doing for you: reducing the clutter of paper and making access to your information easier.

My above-mentioned Tungsten E2 died pretty recently, a violent death most likely caused by a sharp blow while in my pocket. This gave me an opportunity to revisit what I wanted in a PDA, what would really help me work.

Enter the Newton. I had used an OMP (Original MessagePad) years ago, and found the handwriting recognition good, but far too slow. But, I had seen more recently a variety of people pointing out that the 2.1 OS versions are far faster (166mhz instead of 66mhz) and have improved recognition. So good in fact, it’s what Apple dredged up to add it’s Inkwell handwriting recognition into Mac OS X starting with 10.2.

My interest piqued, I did a little research and started playing with Einstein Platform, a Newton OS emulator that’s been getting some press lately. The program itself runs beautifully on Mac OS X, though it took some work to find a compatible Newton ROM. When you start a Newton, by default you are presented with a notepad program which allows you to take freeform or outlined notes, create checklists, or take voice recordings. There is also a variety of other stationery you can install which can provide graph paper, company letterheads, shopping lists, etc. Those stationery templates can have form entry items like pulldowns, checkboxes or bullet-lists which can give uniform, searchable items in your list. All these various notes can be filed/“routed” into folders for sorting, but they are all part of the same program no matter the content or context. This Notes program is the default Backdrop, the program that is left behind when everything else is closed, and for all intents and purposes the main function. If you found yourself living in Dates, Names, or Calls, you could make those, or any other program, the Backdrop. The mechanism for moving the documents around, the Routing interface, is program agnostic, and provides a consistent interface. The overall effect of that and other facilities is a workspace that’s document-centric, and feels more like an extension of how you would use paper.

That taste was enough to hit Ebay and find myself a real honest to goodness MessagePad 2100, the Cadillac of Newtons, to try it out. (To wit: J & K Sales has been very good to me in providing my Newton quickly and at a decent price.)

The handwriting recognition is leaps and bounds better than the Palm Graffiti engine. First off, this is real, natural handwriting recognition, not a special shorthand you have to learn. Second, you can write across the screen naturally, in words and sentences, instead of writing over the same place letter by letter. Third, if you need to crank out notes faster than the engine could translate it, you can change a setting to defer recognition until you are done, and translate it all at once. What really surprised me is how intelligent the recognition was. I have fairly messy handwriting, no doubt in part due to my vast time typing instead over the years. Even given that, the engine has been 99% accurate in figuring out what I am trying to tell it, with the majority of errors being in context recognition rather than letter recognition (E.g. Writing an address and getting an I instead of a 1 when beginning a suite number).

The Newton is arguably the first PDA to be brought to mass market, and who knows what would have happened if Steve had not killed it (mostly over personal differences with previous Apple management). But if you value function over size, and the ability to write naturally, there is still no better answer than the Newton.

What .Mac is and is not -or- Why alternatives are *not* the same as .Mac.

There has been, all over the Tech web, a meme of sorts regarding “replacement” .Mac services.

Now, some point out that you can use Google Pages, Mail, and Groups to substitute some of the funtionality… That there is a Firefox plugin for browser sync between machines… That Box.net provides webdav capable network file-sharing/hosting. That Flickr or Picasa provide Photo publishing.

What they ignore is that these are not the integrated services that .Mac provides… They are not as easy to use, they do not take advantage of the built-in meshing of the iLife suite, and do not have the sync services API benefits that Apple offers for .Mac.

They also forget to mention that if you don’t use iLife, you have to consider what the other programs you might use will cost. Someone mentioned Rapidweaver as an alternative to iWeb.. That the software is as good as iWeb I won’t argue, it was beautifully designed, but it is not as easy as iWeb, does not tie into iLife as seamlessly, and will cast you an extra $39.95.

The notMac Challenge is more interesting because it acknowledges that the .Mac service is easier, they just desire a free or a la carte version with the same ease.

Now, lets look at what you get for your subscription to .Mac/iLife. This Christmas, we took a bunch of pics of our presents, and wanted to share them and, while we were at it, share a bit of other info for family visitors to those pics.

So… import pics to iPhoto, add names/details. Highlight group, click iWeb. Pick a theme, save. Take 10 minutes to frame the about us pages and a welcome, save. Click Publish and start sharing the link.

Both my wife and I are more than capable with HTML, and I with xhtml+css. We could do our own creations and make them look as good… But we could not do it in less than 30 minutes, there would be more chances for error, and it would be harder to maintain.

.Mac sync that means that 90% of what I see on my home and work desktops are always in tune, I never need worry about my keychains, contacts, anything. More and more programs use the same sync services so more goes with me, and with less work on the developers’ parts. It also means that if I’m not at a mac that I can enroll to sync, or worse an another platform, I have access to my bookmarks, my contacts, my email, and any files on iDisk… None of the above services do that all, or as easily.

If you feel that you are not getting your money worth with .Mac, perhaps you should look at all you get and see of there is more you could be taking advantage of… Because there is more there than meets the eye.

Graphic Design-friendly Operating Systems (NeXT/Mac OSX vs Windows)

This is a post that was supposed to go to a thread that either got deleted or I was banned from… It’s too bad, I think this was pretty good…

The original poster was expressing some frustration about people commenting about the oddity of the art dept he works on being PCs rather than Macs. I pointed out some of my frustrations with people thinking PCs were acceptable for doing design or art (They’re not) and he shot back something about the programs being the same between platforms (Adobe stuff mainly) and that the hardware wasn’t different enough to make a case. So….

The question is software vs software, OS vs OS.

Mac OS X, from the day it was a glimmer in Steve Jobs and Avie Tevenians eyes at Next, had clean presentation of graphics as part if it’s design specification. In NextStep and OpenStep, this was facilitated by using Display Postscript as it’s API level drawing system. Everything you saw on screen really was rendered postscript, and if the program didn’t try to do it’s own thing, what you shared or printed was exactly what you saw on screen. This included color management and font management. Fast forward to today, the Mac OS X Quartz API is the same concept, using PDF instead of postscript, but the effect is the same. If the app doesn’t try to do it’s own thing, you get the designed-in, API level benefits of years of thinking about designers and artists.

Windows was never so much designed as muck as cobbled together from what they had already developed, what they could borrow (and get away with), or what they had partners developing. Their network stack is taken whole-cloth from BSD, most of the graphics in the NT family were developed by IBM when they were working together on what was supposed to become the joint of OS/2 and NT, etc. As such, most “features” that might help an artist are bags-on-the-side, not generally well documented, and not always stable.

That programs like the Adobe suite exist on both platforms means that the developer is stuck with the least common denominators, has to develop features on their own rather than taking advantage of a given platform’s strengths, and that features like color management and proper printing are in spite of the OS beneath it, not because of it.

MacDevCenter.com — Xcode for the Rest of Us

MacDevCenter.com — Xcode for the Rest of Us:

Why PackageMaker?

PackageMaker was designed to simplify the creation of installation packages, and to provide a simple, repeatable installation experience for your end users. But what is a package?

A good walkthrough of how to use PackageMaker to build setup packages, so you can push installs of any given file or application easily, and with the full suite of OS X Server you can build package sets and netboot images which install every program you need, with the updated (or thoroughly tested) versions, with customizations per machine…

Part of being a Mac tech is letting the OS do the work and letting you be lazy… Take the time to learn the tools and you’ll never have to work as hard.
Via

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: apple, computer, make, productivity, software

How many ways can you overload a Function Key? – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog

How many ways can you overload a Function Key? – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog:

I loves me some keyboard shortcuts! I’m sure you do too. Here’s how I set up my machine.

We’re blessed with at least 12 function keys on most Mac keyboards, and I like to try and get the most out of them. I haven’t found a use for every single key yet, but I’m working on it!

Frasier Spears is the developer of Xjournal & Flickr Export for iPhoto, so seeing the things he does for his setup is cool… For what it’s worth though, I tend to just use Quicksilver and the little extra typing so I don’t have to reach that much further from home row to get things done.Via O’reilly Mac Devcenter

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: apple, computer, productivity, software

Computer Modern Unicode fonts

Computer Modern Unicode fonts:

Computer Modern Unicode fonts were converted from metafont sources using mftrace with autotrace backend and fontforge (former pfaedit). Their main purpose is to create free good quality fonts for use in X applications supporting many languages. Currently the fonts contain glyphs from Latin1 (Metafont ec, tc), Cyrillic (lh) and Greek (cbgreek when available) code sets and IPA extensions (from tipa). Other alphabets are also welcome. Now this set contains 25 fonts. It is better to use these fonts with antialiasing enabled.

Look at this table for more description.

These fonts are distributed under the terms of X11 License with an exception for font embedding into documents. Some scripts for font generation are distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License. The versions 0.2.2 and before were distributed under the terms of Latex Project Public License (LPPL) Version 1.2.

This is a Free, very legible and complete set of fonts, available in formats Mac, PC, and X11 will be happy with.

[posted with ecto]

Running Down The Way Up from the album “Movement in Still Life�? by BT

Technorati Tags: design, fonts, computer, printing

A List Apart: Articles: In Search of the Holy Grail

A List Apart: Articles: In Search of the Holy Grail:

A recent project has brought my personal grail quest to an end. The technique I’ll describe will allow you to deploy the Holy Grail layout without compromising your code or your flexibility. It will:

1. have a fluid center with fixed width sidebars,
2. allow the center column to appear first in the source,
3. allow any column to be the tallest,
4. require only a single extra div of markup, and
5. require very simple CSS, with minimal hacks patches.

This is a simple, elegant solution for what can be the hardest layout to implement on a website, yet the most readable and clean looking. Also, his solution works on all the good browsers, needs only one tiny fix for IE6… It doesn’t work in IE5, but anyone who’s using IE5 needs to have their computer euthanized for being a menace to web designers and the community as a whole.

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: art, computer, design, internet

Emulate :: Designer Emulation Kit :: MMckenna

Emulate :: Designer Emulation Kit :: MMckenna:

The Designer Emulation Kits (DEK’s for short) are meant as the sincerest homage to some of the greatest modern designers of our time. The lamps and designers being “emulated�? have a particular importance. They are represented in countless design tomes extolling the various movements, and they are held up as prime examples of “good design.�?

Via Boing Boing

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: art, design

American Book Review 100 best first lines of novels

American Book Review:

100 Best First Lines from Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

It’s amazing how many of these I recognize and have read… But interesting list

Technorati Tags: philosophy, printing