Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

My friend John Welch has posted an epic treatise entitled, “Talking with Sysadmins, a programmer’s primer,” reading I enthusiastically recommend for any developer, or anyone who interacts with their local sysadmin. I certainly share John’s thoughts concerning this subject, and he has written those thoughts with an energy and at a length that I’m simply not motivated to do.

When I think of what iWeb should have been (or should become), I think of Windows Live Writer. WLW will publish to Windows Live Spaces, which could be equated with .Mac inasmuch as it’s a place to publish pages provided by the software creator, and additionally, WLW publishes pages to other blogging services. That’s very important. Those services include Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, and many others.

My particular site uses Wordpress. I’d like to have an app where I can quickly and easily generate content and then publish it to my personal Wordpress installation. Blogging software that publishes to different services means that those who currently blog don’t have to give up a blogging engine and feature set they’re familiar with, try to move years of postings between different software, or be limited by the (lack of) features (iWeb) in the application’s blogging function. iWeb can still keep all of its iLife-y goodness, and I bet many of those things could be integrated into existing blog services as well. I know Wordpress provides a way to publish static pages.

Making iWeb flexible so that established bloggers can use it with existing or third party services would make iWeb inestimably more valuable and repair what has become a somewhat tarnished reputation the software has earned.

One thing that wasn’t talked about during last week’s keynote and Leopard preview that I desperately hoped would be a major topic was the Finder. I think most Mac users will agree that, for such an important part of the operating system, the Finder frankly sucks ass. I’m not speaking about spatialness or interface, I’m speaking about basic functionality. Somewhere on the net, I posted this recipe that I’ve found to be a sure fire way to crash the Finder on my machine:

• Mount an AFP network volume.
• Put my PowerBook to sleep.
• Move out of range of my wireless network, such as going to work form home.
• Wake my PowerBook and attempt to use the Finder. Instant spinning ball! The only way out that I’ve found is to hard restart the machine. And yes, I’ve waited upwards of 20 minutes in the past for the Finder to recover. Relaunching the Finder has never worked for me either.

So what should happen? The Finder should quickly realize the network volume isn’t available and dismount it, causing no interruption to the user. Mac OS is probably the most stable OS I’ve used, which is what makes the flaky Finder so disappointing and aggravating.

Here’s another Finder oddity I discovered this evening: I mounted an AFP network volume, and after some time, I put my PowerBook to sleep. When I woke it up, I couldn’t eject the volume. I could read and write, but not eject. Thankfully, the Finder didn’t hang making the machine useless, as in my previous example. The only way I could dismount the volume was to logout and login again. Completely unacceptable.

Here’s to hoping that Leopard will FTFF. An otherwise excellent operating system deserves better than a flaky file manager such as the Finder in its current incarnation.

Here’s an e-mail I got from my friend John Kurokawa this morning:

Hey Aaron,

… I have to take my PowerBook in to the Apple Store in Cleveland. If anyone ever asks you why they should get AppleCare, show them these pictures.

I walked away from the machine for 2 minutes, and when I came back, found a lovely (Aqua?) blue line running through the screen. It was like I’d been bitchslapped by my ex. It’s there when I boot off my installation CD and it passes the Apple hardware test, so I’m pretty sure it’s a motherboard/videocard problem. Anyway, I’ll take it to a Genius and leave it in the hands of the gods!

…

Later,

John

He’s had that PowerBook for (I think) two years now, and who-knows-what created this particular problem. If I remember correctly, AppleCare for a PowerBook cost somewhere in the $300 range. LCD or logic board replacement would likely cost much more.

I understand as much as any technical person that the point of WWDC was to give other technical people their first look at upcoming technologies in Leopard and face time with Apple engineers. Most (if not all) of that information is covered by non-disclosure agreement. It’s not intended for public consumption. Apple doesn’t want the world to know about the guts of Leopard until the software is officially released.

The WWDC keynote, however, is not covered by NDA. It’s very public, and you could probably argue that it’s staged primarily for the benefit of the press rather than WWDC attendees. The keynote is where Apple reveals what it wants the public to know about Leopard, and for those who don’t or can’t attend WWDC, it’s our only source of information so far about the OS upgrade coming our way next spring.

Some people, most notably Leander Kahney of Wired, have commented that they found the keynote disappointing. Kahney is known for his blanket treatment of Mac users as cultist freaks, and it’s easy and maybe even appropriate for those who aren’t cultist freaks to dismiss him outright. However, in this particular instance, I agree with him to some extent.

As the public face of Leopard so far, the keynote was ho-hum, in my opinion. OS X is reaching a point where new releases are incremental on the surface rather than revolutionary. I understand that. It’s mature. The incurious mainstream media, where most people will get their information about Leopard, and non-technical users likely don’t realize what under-the-hood changes must occur to make something like a completely 64-bit OS and Time Machine possible. They see the face, not the organs. And as the face goes, Leopard looks good, but not great.

My personal opinion of the keynote, or anyone else’s for that matter, doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for Leopard. I understand (or at least, I think I do) what the new underlying technologies mean for the OS going forward. Some of the “top secret” features could be revealed over the coming months and they could blow us away. Additionally, one keynote that doesn’t meet the expectations of some doesn’t necessarily indicate the implosion of the entire company or the failure of an entire OS.

The keynote is over. Leopard is coming. There’s a lot of time between the two, and Apple engineers and developers aren’t spending it asleep, or worrying about what anyone thought of the keynote.