maniacal rage

Macworld has a new feature story called Picking Our Favorite Leopard Features, wherein various staff rate their favorite new stuff in 10.5. Among the selection are the commonly-touted features like iChat screen sharing, Cover Flow in Finder, Spaces and Time Machine, but Rob Griffiths chose something no one else mentioned, and a feature I'm particularly thrilled with: AutoFS.

There hasn't been a lot said about AutoFS, but I consider it to be one of my most-requested features for OS X: Putting network mounting on separate threads. Griffiths defends his decision to include it in his list (at number two no less) and describes it thusly:

Why give up such a high draft pick for this seemingly obscure technology related to networked volumes? Because AutoFS in OS X 10.5 is, quite simply, a revolution. AutoFS is responsible for the mounting and dismounting of network shares, and in Leopard, it will uses separate “threads” for these tasks. What does that mean in English? It means the end of the spinning rainbow of doom you see when you, for instance, click on a network share in the Finder, only to remember that you put the shared computer to sleep earlier.

One of the most irritating issues with OS X is the Finder's inability to deal with network-mounted disks gracefully. I need an abacus to count how many times in the last week alone the Finder has hung for two minutes because my Airdisk became unavailable or Katia's iMac was sleeping when I tried to access it.

Since switching to the Mac in 2002, this has been one of my biggest (and most common) complaints with OS X and I'm absolutely thrilled it has finally been solved. While it's nice to have lots of shiny new GUI features in 10.5, I can't help but be even more excited by the simple core functionality updates like AutoFS.

I've written about my obsession with finding the perfect mouse before. I've had so many mice the past few years and I've still yet to find the right one.

For the last 16 months or so I've been using an extremely cheap but surprisingly good Logitech LX7 USB cordless mouse. I say surprisingly good because at under $40, I expected it to be a total piece of garbage. It works well, however, ignoring the fact that it has a huge dongle and loses its connection all the time. It's also completely hand-neutral, so it's comfortable with my left hand. In fact, if it weren't for the disconnections, occasional skipping and such, I'd be perfectly happy with it.

But I want the perfect mouse. I want something that works well all the time, is comfortable, and never makes me think about the fact that I'm using it. So I'm always looking.

People always tell me the wireless Mighty Mouse is great. I know people who are huge fans of it. They say that it's much better than the wired version and that it works really well. They're liars.

I bought the original wireless Mighty Mouse and declared it shit immediately. One year later now, I've just purchased the newer model (which I was hoping had some improved internals rather than just changing the color of the side buttons to white) and I'm declaring it equally as shitty.

Quite frankly, the Mighty Mouse is one of the worst things Apple has ever designed. Wired or wireless.

For starters, the wireless version is laggy. It's not smooth at all. The default tracking speed when you pair it for the first time is insultingly slow. No one on earth would want it at this speed. Cranking it all the way up will give you a normal tracking speed, but don't attempt to move the mouse slowly and deliberately, because it's total crap on that level. It's imprecise, jittery, and, well, not to sound like a broken record or anything, total shit.

I noticed the wired Mighty Mouse that came with Katia's new iMac was better about click-detection (you know, the whole problem where the mouse requires you not touch one side when clicking the other for it to properly register a click), but the wireless model is not at all. Same stupid problem. If you finger is even one millimeter over the line of the side button, your clicks drop into a black hole. How the hell does anyone use this piece of shit?

Quickly, now, since I'm screaming out loud and losing my mind: The scrolling ball is a horrible design decision, it doesn't work that well and it gets too dirty too quickly.

Seriously. Apple. Change this. If anyone on earth could build the perfect mouse, I thought it would be you. But this isn't it.

I'm sure there would be many more options open to me if I wasn't left handed, but such is life. In the mean time, I'm going back to my LX7 for now. I'll just occasionally yell when it loses its connection. At least when its connected it works well.

Today UPS delivered an XBOX 360 to my door. I say "an" XBOX, not "my" XBOX, because Microsoft didn't repair my busted box, they just sent me a replacement. In a letter enclosed, they wrote:

So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker, we have replaced your Xbox console with a replacement unit.

Now, poor language aside, a translation for this would be: Every XBOX we've ever made is busted, we've got too many repairs, it's cheaper just to give you a new one. So we did.

Don't get me wrong—I'm happy. It cut the repair time from an estimated four to six weeks to three weeks and that's good for me. Now it's time to get back to Guitar Hero II!

Since releasing Leaflets, we've received some feedback regarding the Safari 3 requirement. Generally, there have been two types: First, people wanted to try the demo and were frustrated that the browser check wouldn't let them if they weren't using Safari 3, and second, people were upset that we had designed for only one browser.

The first issue (demo browser-sniffing) was both an accident and a quality-control issue. It was an accident because I wrote the sniffing code late at night just before launch and I completely forgot that, hey, other browsers use WebKit. So searching the user agent string for Safari is pretty stupid. I fixed this a few hours after launch—users can now view screenshots of the various Leaflets and then try the demo, although they'll be warned before it loads the first time if they're not using Safari. The whole reason for the browser requirement in the first place, though, was related to the quality-control issue.

We didn't want to have people without Safari 3 trying to use the demo, because without Safari 3, Leaflets looks odd in places. We rely heavily on Safari 3's CSS3 support and when you view the site with another browser, parts of the navigation are rendered as blank or squares and are unclear (thus, it's difficult to use).

Aside from the use of -webkit-border-radius, which is not a valid CSS property, we aren't using any special hacks or tricks to style Leaflets. In fact, the primary feature of CSS3 we use throughout the site, and which is vital to the display, is multiple background support. Sure, we could design the site without using this (and, thus, support more browsers without visual quirks), but there's a huge benefit to using this feature: Bandwidth savings.

Each of our Leaflets that uses the common top navigation bar has a different color scheme. Some have different button configurations and differently sized breadcrumb elements. We use multiple backgrounds to share a few images to create many differently sized buttons and shapes. And because they're all transparent, we can change the background color of the bar to alter the shade of the images. Not having to download multiple images saves the user bandwidth. And by using multiple backgrounds, we can also cut down on the amount of code structure on each page, adding more to bandwidth savings.

A few complaints were along the lines of "if you had just written Leaflets in standards compliant code, it would work perfectly in every browser." And, of course, we did write it using standards compliant XHTML (validate it yourself). Leaflets does work in other browsers and older phones, it just doesn't look so hot without CSS3 support (see it running on an older Samsung A900). And, to be fair, we all know that writing things using web standards does not ensure things will work in every browser. I wish it did.

We didn't choose to limit Leaflets to Safari 3 because we're elitist jerks or to make it iPhone-only. It's just that iPhone is the only device on the market that has a really modern, nearly fully-featured browser. Javascript, CSS3, full-scale rendering—it all adds up to a great experience, and we wanted to create something that was more than just the average mobile application. Our goal was to take web services people were already familiar with and modify them to fit the mobile context. Fast downloads without compromising user interaction and experience. iPhone allowed us to do that quite well, we think.

Turns out I'm not alone in my XBOX 360 problems—today, Microsoft admitted that every XBOX sold in the past 19 months has a "design flaw" that will cause it to eventually fail. Wow.

So if you have an XBOX that was sold before, oh, tomorrow, you could eventually (and probably will) have a failed unit that will take four to six weeks to repair (that was the repair estimate I received yesterday). Yikes.

To be fair, it sucks but I'm not nearly as mad as I should be because the console is just so damned good that it's worth it in the long run. But they're lucky. I simply cannot wait for more Guitar Hero II. Six weeks! Christ!

Let's say I wanted to get a VESA mounting arm for my 23-inch Cinema Display. Would anyone have a recommendation for me? Here are the only two important features I'm looking for:

• Attaches by clamping onto a desk that's 0.75 inches thick
• Allows me to rotate the display from landscape to portrait

That and it needs to support the weight of the display itself. Of course, it would be a bonus if the arm were silver or white, but I'm not too picky.

If you have any suggestions, send them to garrett at maniacalrage dot net. Thanks!

I'm still completely in love with my MacBook Pro¹, but I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't have a draft-N Airport card and that there's no way to upgrade it.

One good thing about the old days of buying an Airport card and installing it yourself was that there was an Airport card you could take out and replace if you wanted to. My MacBook Pro was the first machine I've ever purchased where the Aiport card was a feature that had to be included at the point of sale and wasn't user installable or removable. And, as such, now with Apple releasing draft-N-compatible cards, I'm out of luck.

This is unfortunate for several reasons, the biggest of which is that everything in our apartment is running on wifi at this point. I've got my MBP and Katia's MB, as well as a plethora of other devices² all running in 802.11g mode. Now don't get me wrong, it's fast, but when one of us is uploading photos to Flickr, you definitely feel the slowdown on all other devices. And by slowdown I mean all other devices absolutely crawl.

Hoping there might be an option for upgrades to machines like mine, I stopped by the Apple Store to ask a "genius." He said (I'm paraphrasing here) Apple didn't plan to offer upgrades to older machines, in part because the new draft-N cards uses three-wire antennas and the older cards have two-wire antennas, so the upgrade would be more than just the card itself.

It looks like the only solution for non-N-enabled MacBook Pro users will be to use an ExpressCard/34 device, something like the one Belkin released at MacWorld this year. Of course, then you've got a big hunk of plastic sticking out of the side of your laptop, which isn't too pleasant or sleek. And, of course, this doesn't help MacBook users who don't have the slot. They'll need to use a USB device which is even clunkier.

Obviously, there's only so much complaining you can do about things like this—computers evolve and technology improves and you'll never be able to have it all for very long. It still stings, though.

On a side note, I think the new Aiport Extreme pages on the Apple site are some of the most attractive product pages I've ever seen them do. That background gradient and the colors are really nice.

I'm currently sitting in on the wrap-up panel here at @media 2006, so now is as good a time as any to give an overall impression of the conference:

• The panels and presentations were, on a whole, a little light. I knew coming in to this that the general target audience for the conference was a little lower-level than I would generally be interested in, but I was surprised by some of the presentations (the accessibility one, for instance, the Dave Shea typography presentation for another) and their lack of useful information. It's interesting hear Dave tell you which fonts he likes, but I'm not sure anything he presented helped us. (Everyone at the conference had heard of sIFR, so how does talking about it being available help anyone?)
• The Javascript Libraries session was interesting, if only to hear about all the different libraries people are using and hearing a panel talk about the pros and cons. Simon Willison (who looks about twelve years old and works at Yahoo!) seems like a genuinely smart guy who had some interesting thoughts on the whole JS library movement.
• Tantek Çelik's presentation on microformats was the most interesting to me, since I've been following the whole microformats thing but haven't implemented any. His presentation definitely got me thinking about all the places that I should be and could be using microformats and I think I'm going to start doing it in the very near future (one might see microformats in the next version of SimpleLog, perhaps...).

If anything, it was worth the trip just to meet some of the people I've been wanting to meet in person for a long time. When there's someone who you genuinely like and agree with, it's fantastic to meet them in person and be able to have a conversation in thirty seconds that would take days via email.

Finally met Reid Philpot in person (he used to run explodingfist.com), as well as Dan Cederholm (whose second-day keynote was quite good), and had a few beers and good conversation with Jon Hicks last night. Jon's a great guy and it was nice to finally meet him in person.

On a whole, I've had a good time these past few days. The conference was a little lacking information-wise, but I think I knew that might be the case going in. I'm off to France tomorrow to meet up with Katia and to start our vacation.

The wifi connection here at the conference center is crummy. I feel like technology conferences should never have that problem. Ever. Especially a web-based conference.

I just got out of the accessibility session, and I have to say it was one of the most boring and useless bits of information I've ever heard. I'm interested in accessibility, but, in general, I don't practice making sites I create accessible because I don't tend to create sites specific to disabled peoples. Nearly everything I create is text-based and I code to XHTML standards, so it's a reasonable assumption that my site will be accessible to most people. I am still, however, interested in the technology and standards, and so I was interested in the session. I was hoping they would fill me in on how current accessibility technology works and some best practices. Instead, it was simply forty minutes of talking about the current status of the documentation. The entire session was about the quality of the documentation. Yuck.

If you want more accessible sites, you should convince more people like me to get into making our sites accessible. But you're not going to do that by complaining about the verbosity of documentation.

I haven't been without a computer at home in a very long time, and I must say that it's a very strange feeling. I'm so used to using a computer all the time. Even when it's unnecessary. I'll check my email ten times while watching a DVD. I'll browse the internet while waiting for food to cook. I'll check the weather a few times before I leave the house in the morning.

Lately, I haven't been doing a lot of "real" computing stuff at home (hence the selling of the Quad), except for the podcast, so I'm not feeling a serious lack without having a computer around. It's just the little time fillers. I'm so used to having a computer within reach at all times that I'm going through a little bit of withdrawal.

Combine the lack of computers with Katia being gone for the weekend visiting a friend and me being in the office by myself doing some work, and I've had a very strange and isolating few days by myself. I wouldn't want to live this way, but it hasn't been too awful.

Things will begin to change on the computer-front at home on Wednesday, when the first of a few toys arrives...

Right, so I sold the Quad, and I also sold the older PowerBook. That's fine and all, except that I sold both of them on the same day, and now I have no computer at home. There are new things on their way (more on this later), but they won't be here until the middle of next week.

Until then, however, I'm computerless. I could use my PC (yuck!), but I sold all of my displays! I'm completely screwed. And, to top that off, I have a project I have to finish this weekend, so I'm at the office working here. It's a nice day out, it's memorial day weekend, and I'm here, in the office, doing work. Weee!

Hey, at least there are new toys coming soon...