Category Archives: Apple

Mac

professional software != software used by professionals

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Adam Engst of TidBits got upset that an update to Apple Pages that impacted Engst’s workflow for creating EPUBs.  In short, Pages changed several behaviors that Engst relied on for creating EPUBs.  Engst, even though he knows that Apple’s release notes are not reliable indicators of what changes have gone into a product, accepted the new update to an essential application without testing it.  And when things broke, he found himself in a very difficult position that required a lot of time and effort to fix.  He says this about the experience:

That shows a profound lack of respect for customers on Apple’s part, and is particularly offensive when it comes to tools used by professionals. It’s bad enough when Apple causes normal users significant headaches, such as with the massive changes in iTunes 11, which cannot be downgraded to iTunes 10.7 (see “iTunes 11: The Features Apple Removed, and Alternatives,” 4 December 2012). But when Apple’s decision to conceal changes threatens one’s livelihood, it’s time to start looking at tools from companies who care about their customers.

The problem is, Engst missed many issues.  Any professional knows that you don’t update software that is essential to your business without testing it first.  You make sure that it works first, and you run it through several tests before updating everyone.  Engst also had unrealistic expectations about Apple updates: it’s already well-known by everyone who’s been using Macs for years (as Engst has) that Apple’s release notes are quite thin and rarely give information about all of the updates that are included in this.

But most importantly, “software used by professionals” is not the same as “professional software”.  Professional software does have higher expectations associated with it: higher expectations about how it’s tested, how it’s documented, how it’s supported.  In general, this means that professional software has a higher price tag associated with it.  Software that just happens to be used by professionals doesn’t have those expectations.  Apple has never claimed that Pages is professional software.  Basing your professional workflow around an application that is not professional software, and then not testing updates when you know that you cannot trust the release notes for this application, is not professional behavior.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think that Apple’s release notes should be so short.  Writing useful release notes isn’t difficult, and Apple should step up and do it.  That said, I think that expecting software used by professionals to be up to the bar set by professional software is unrealistic.  Use professional tools, get professional results.  Use tools that aren’t intended for professional results, and you might get lucky and get professional results, but you can’t rely on it.  Pages is $20.  You get what you pay for, and you did not pay for a professional application.

(Edited on January 28th, because I can’t type and got the price of Pages wrong.  It’s $20.)

Mac

how to rip audio losslessly from a DVD?

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Okay, I asked on Stack Exchange, but I’ll ask here too …

In Mountain Lion, how do I rip only the audio from a DVD as losslessly as possible? I have several concert DVDs that I would like to listen to on my iPod. I have an extensive music library1, which is mostly ripped from my own CDs in Apple Lossless format, so my best-case scenario is getting lossless audio off of the DVDs and converting it to ALAC.

I realize that the audio tracks on DVDs might already be lossy if they’re in AC3 format, but PCM is lossless. If there is PCM audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and convert that to ALAC. If there is AC3 audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and pretend that I’m not annoyed by a lossy resampling in the conversion of AC3 (which I can’t listen to on any device that I own) to AAC (or something else).

I know that Handbrake is great for ripping video, but its FAQ says that it doesn’t do audio only.  AudioHijackPro will record the audio, so that’s introducing an unnecessary layer of loss if the audio is PCM, and I’m not sure if resampling an AC3-to-AAC is less lossy than recording an AC3 track into MP3.

I’m willing to deal with a convoluted workflow to achieve my goal. I could also revert to Windows if necessary; I’ve got a Win7 VM readily available, and I have a Win2k8 server sitting under my desk for testing purposes.

  1. Currently around 40k tracks, and ever-growing; I purchased over 100 albums last year alone. ↩
Apple

a rare look inside Apple

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Don Melton, an ex-Apple engineering director, has given a little bit of insight into the secretiveness of his former employer.  He’s written a great blog post about how he was tasked with building Safari and keeping it a secret.

I think that the most interesting thing about this is that he hired David Hyatt, who had worked on Mozilla and Netscape, and that little tidbit made it to Macrumors at the time. He even blogged about it, although didn’t say what he was working on.

Apple, Microsoft

herp derp

2 Comments

Oh, the herp derp of this story, courtesy of a “staff writer” at 9-5 Mac: No Microsoft products were reported stolen.  Yeah, yeah, tee-hee, someone broke into a Microsoft office and stole some iPads.  Tee-hee, Microsoft has iPads, tee-hee they didn’t steal any MS products.

Except, of course, you could bother to take advantage of the knowledge that SVC Building 5 is where the Apple Productivity Experiences team (that is, the team formerly known as the Macintosh Business Unit, my former team) lives.  And presuming that this was just a theft of opportunity, Building 5 is a good one for opportunity.  Its main entrance faces US-101, and doesn’t have a single external door that’s visible from La Avenida (which is its street address).  It’s immediately next to the VTA bus depot.  According to the article, the theft occurred during the holiday week, and that campus was probably all but deserted that week.  There’s no signs of a break-in, which means that it was probably either someone who has physical access to the building (anyone with a current MS badge, which includes employees, contractors, security guards, the catering staff, etc), or someone who tailgated someone with a badge.  So someone got into the building, saw small items that are very easy to walk off with, and did so.

In other words: if you’re gonna make Microsoft jokes, at least make sure that they’re not lame ones.  Breaking into a Microsoft building and having Apple products stolen is an easy joke to make, which means that it’s just lame.  Stop being lame, people.  Herp derp.

Apple, iPad, iPhone, Mac

a memo to Notifications Center (Mountain Lion edition)

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Dear Notifications Center,

I hate you.

I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.

Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now.  And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”.  There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X.  There’s just those two options.  I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now.  In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11.  You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.

Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want.  I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications).  I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts.  There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me.  The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention.  Other than that: GTFO.

I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there.  My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago).  Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?

I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar.  Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time.  I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.

I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners.  But no, I can’t do that.  I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.

In short, feel free to FOAD.

No love,
Nadyne.

MWSF

it’s official!

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It’s official!  I’m on the MacIT conference advisory board.  They get a girl and someone who knows enterprises, all wrapped up in one sarcastic package.  I’m not sure they realize what they’ve signed up for.

(Actually, I’ve been participating in this for months, but I’ve been excessively bad about getting a bio and headshot to IDG for inclusion on the website.)

Apple

ten reasons why I hate iTunes 11

29 Comments

I hate the new iTunes.  Hatehatehatehatehate it.

  1. My favorite view is gone.  I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs.  Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues:
    1. Songs – Impossible to scan, because there’s no differentiation between albums.  It’s just a laundry list of my music, which on my small iTunes library at work is 23,212 items as of this writing.
    2. Albums – This clearly wasn’t designed for someone who has a large library.  It’s also difficult to scan for something.  And yes, I do like scanning my library.  Searching is fine, but sometimes i just want to scan.
    3. Artists and Genres – These are the closest to the old view that I loved, but there’s so much wasted space here that it drives me mad.  I like whitespace, but they’ve crossed over from whitespace into wasted space.  Also, of course, this is per-artist (or per-genre), which isn’t a complete view of my music collection.
  2. I clicked on “auto-size all columns” in the main songs view, which gave me columns that are all massive, and there’s no undo.  Now I have to manually resize them.  This is okay since I’ve got my laptop connected to a 24″ external monitor, and I put iTunes into fullscreen mode on it so that I could see more than one column (because apparently I’ve got some songs and albums with long titles), but is nearly impossible otherwise.
  3. The fonts are all wrong.  I don’t know how the fonts got to be all wrong, but they are.  The kerning is wrong, the weighting is wrong.  I have no idea how you can make Helvetica look so horrible, and I assume that you have to work hard on doing so.  This contributes to being difficult to read and difficult to scan.  It’s especially noticeable when bold is used, which is in a surprisingly high number of places.  I don’t hate Helvetica as much as some folks do, but something’s wrong with its use in iTunes.
  4. Tooltips are gone.  Apparently they’ve forgotten one of Neilsen’s heuristics, recognition over recall. I have to recall what these buttons mean.  I used to be able to recognize them and have the tooltip there at the ready to help me when I couldn’t recognize them.  Looking at podcasts, for example, there’s four buttons immediately after the name of the podcast, and I had to click on two of them to see what they were.  Or, let’s consider the gear icon, which is mostly used for settings, except in the sidebar, where it’s “export”.  How can I recall what an icon means when it has multiple meanings?
  5. Buttons have lost their button-y look.  In most places, this isn’t an issue.  I don’t mind that the previous/play/next buttons in the main toolbar of the app are just icons and don’t have any kind of visual indication that they’re buttons.  Those three buttons together have a lot of meaning on their own, I recognize them immediately, and I’m okay.  However, in other places, it’s often difficult to tell what’s a button and what’s not.  For example, those four buttons after the name of the podcast have insufficient whitespace to immediately identify that they’re buttons.  Also, the play button out of context from its previous/next siblings just looks like an arrow (and that’s a glyph that I’ve seen in the names of songs and podcasts).
  6. … Except when they haven’t.  There’s still a few buttons hanging around.  There’s a nice bug “unsubscribe” button for podcasts, except it’s all in caps, just in case you weren’t aware that This Is A Button.
  7. The removal of the sidebar makes creating playlists a lot more difficult.  If you don’t re-enable the sidebar, the only way to add a song to a playlist is via command-click.  With the sidebar, you can just drag a song (or a group of songs) to the playlist on the left.
  8. In books, I’m now forced to care about the difference between “books” and “PDFs”.  They’re both stuff that I want to read, and a lot of those PDFs are books.  They might not be in a book-related file format like epub, but they’re still books in any way that I care about.
  9. Movies, TV shows, and podcasts have all added an “unwatched” (or “unplayed”, for podcasts) type.  This is inconsistent with all other views, because it’s the only view where I’m now viewing a subset of the available content.  Unwatched is now the default view, which makes this doubly annoying.
  10. Search is  s l o w.  I know I’ve got a big library and that I type fast, but I can click to the search box and type a whole song or artist name before a single character appears there.  Since I can’t scan my library anymore, search is important, and it’s all but unresponsive.

UGH.

Mac

iTunes and half-star ratings

1 Comment

Some time ago, I discovered that you could enable half-star ratings in iTunes with a simple Terminal command1:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Ever since I enabled that, I’ve been happily half-starring items.  When your music library runs to well over 40k songs, there is a difference between a five-star song, a four-and-a-half-star song, and a four-star song.

But then, sometime after I upgraded to Mountain Lion on my work computer, I noticed that all of my half-stars were gone.  My heart skipped a beat: I’d put a fair amount of work into rating those songs, and the idea of having to go back through and re-doing it made me quite cranky.  But I love my half-stars, so I quit iTunes, ran that Terminal command again, and re-launched it.

And then, I discovered that all of my half-star ratings were back.  Apparently those half-stars weren’t lost, they were just truncated when the correct bit wasn’t flipped.  Which means I can stop flipping out.

So, if you ever find yourself in my boat, try re-enabling half-stars with the Terminal command above, and see if iTunes does the right thing.  I hope it does.

  1. A tip of the hat to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the original tip. ↩
Apple, Mac

local and iCloud notes in Notes.app?

4 Comments

Does anyone know if it’s possible to have both local and cloud notes when using Notes.app in Mountain Lion?  I’ve been using Notes.app on my work Mac, and I have some notes in iCloud that I’d like to have access to when I’m at work, but I don’t want my local notes to get merged into iCloud.  I’ve tried a few different configurations, and I don’t seem to be able to keep both.

Has anyone else found a solution to this?  Other than “don’t use iCloud” or “don’t use Notes.app”, that is.