blog.mignault.net

Grand Text Auto » Programs Ted Nelson Likes: “When I pressed him to mention any programs - including small-scale ones like games - that influenced him, he said he wasn’t a game guy and just mentioned some other ‘full platforms’ that aren’t computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash.”

2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Which 2 I mean is left as a really simple exercise for the reader. I wonder if Mark Bernstein’s seen this?

(Via.)

UPDATE: He’s seen it.

Technorati Tags:
mac, emacs, tinderbox, hypertext, ted nelson

A little play this morning:

Man, System 7 rocked. Anyone got a copy of HyperCard somewhere?
I was creating a system disk to use with miniVMac and dragging and dropping floppy image files on the emulator window. Virtual floppy swapping. Weird.

Technorati Tags:
apple, mac, minivmac, emulator

Since I’ve been less than complimentary about NetNewsWire in the past, I thought it only fair to say that I’ve returned to using it as my primary newsreader. I decided to take yet another look because of all the stories on Newsgator’s making it free; since I’ve had a paid license since somewhere back around version 1.0, this wasn’t my primary reason for trying it again.

As to my biggest gripe with the software, the absolutely horrible syncing with NewsGator online, I solved that problem by opening a new Newsgator online account and simply importing my Google reader subs into that new account. So far it has worked well. I’m not entirely happy that the only way to get it to work right was to start completely afresh, but it is what it is. Overall, though, I’m glad to be using NetNewsWire again.

Technorati Tags:
apple, mac, rss, netnewswire, nnw, feedreaders, newsgator

I was looking at the OmniFocus forums yesterday, trying to figure out a way I could sync the app between my work and home machine (I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing) and there was a post from Tom Negrino on how he does it:

I’d like to sync OF between my MacPro up in my office (where the app and its database lives) and my MacBook down in the house, but I’m not going to try to figure out rsync to do it. I don’t even have OF installed on the MacBook, but I still use the laptop to enter and edit info in OF when I’m not in my office.

How, you ask? Both machines are running Leopard, and I use Leopard’s Screen Sharing to view and work with the MacPro’s screen from the MacBook. It works great.

I used some of the tips from Macworld’s Screen Sharing article to improve the sharing experience.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1310…harepower.html

This works easily for me because my house and office are on the same LAN, but I think it will work over the Internet, too, though you may have to fiddle with router settings.

Until the Omni folks deliver their own sync features, screen sharing does it for me.

And I sort of like this idea, with 2 exceptions:

1. I don’t actually use OmniFocus on the iMac, the only machine I have running Leopard, and
2. I find it kind of clumsy to have to switch to that damn window every time I want to use the app.

And then it hit me, thinking about that recent post about NYPL and Mac virtualization, is that what I really want is Unity for Screen Sharing! Wouldn’t it be great if I could run an app on another machine but have it be just another window? X11 does this, right?

Well, VMWare guys, are you listening?

Technorati Tags:
apple, geek, mac, vmware+fusion

Starbucks Ditches T-Mobile and Brings in AT&T as Exclusive Wi-Fi Provider | Epicenter from Wired.com:

If you’re an iPhone owner and are wondering how the new deal affects you, apparently the answer is not at all. In September Apple announced a new partnership with Starbucks and T-Mobile to let iPhone and iPod touch users to access T-Mobile’s HotSpots for free in order to download and listen to music via the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. That iTunes Wi-Fi Store partnership is still in effect, but will contiue under under AT&T’s Wi-Fi service.
Other than that, iPhone owners shouldn’t expect any other preferential treatment or special access at Starbucks in the near term.
‘This offer is for AT&T broadband customers who can access Wi-Fi in the stores over a Wi-Fi-enabled device. [iPhone users] who are not broadband subscribers can’t access for free at this time,’ AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told Ars Technica.

Well, that bites. At least this was finally a clear explanation - I’ve seen several posts claiming that iPhone users would get free service at Starbucks as a result of this deal. Didn’t make sense. The iTunes store was the only thing I ever checked at Starbucks anyway.

(Via Wired News.)

Technorati Tags:
iphone, starbucks, apple

Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

Technorati Tags:
libraries, mac, nypl

I was one of those Mac greybeards (though I lost the Classic fetish, natch; I don’t enjoy spectacular crashes) whose formative word processing time was spent using Microsoft Word 3.1, maybe the best Mac word processor ever made. Mac Word has gone the usual MS application route of feature bloat, making the easy excruciating, and Total World Format Domination (including what appears to be the deliberate trashing of backwards compat in the newest Windows versions; is this actually true?)

So I was an early convert to Nisus Writer, which in its Classic versions offered some heady geek-level features (Perl for macros! Regexp!) but still could just straight-up open up a vein. I’ve followed them over to Express and now Pro, but there is one goddamn feature that’s keeping me from ditching the Big Bankcode Font W for good.

That is Track Changes. I desperately need Track Changes. We collaborate the living hell out of a document here at MPOW, and that means we TRACK CHANGES. To within an inch of a file’s life.

Nisus has been promising this feature, or least acknowledging the lack thereof, for a good couple years now at least, by my reading of their support forums. I’d like to see it move up on their priority list. I don’t want to have to buy YET ANOTHER Mac wp. Mellel didn’t do it for me, NeoOffice does some nice stuff but is heir to the death by a million small cuts that is OpenOffice on the Mac, and I don’t want to spend my sucker early adopter iPhone Apple Store credit for iWork (or is it iHardlyWorking?) Come on, Nisus, move it up.

Technorati Tags: mac, ms office, Nisus, office, word

My iPhone is not unlocked, but I had installed Installer.app and a couple applications, though the only ones I was using with any regularity were iFlickr and Erica Sadun’s SendPics. I installed it last night, after making sure to sync up first. Partway into the “Preparing iPhone” progress bar, the phone went dark and then popped up the yellow triangle/”Please connect to iTunes” screen, which I took as a sign that things were not going well. A few minutes later I got a -1005 (iirc) error message from iTunes. Even with a backup, I still always get that frisson of fear when something like that happens.

Fortunately, at that point I just restored. I lost some photos that I hadn’t imported - somehow I had gotten the dumb idea that photos were imported without pressing the damn import button- but otherwise I’m back to normal, if less my iToner ringtones and Installer.app.

The iTunes WiFi music store is pretty cool. You could easily drop a lot of impulse money on it. Not that I have, of course; I just bought a couple things in the interests of investigating the interface. The store gives Apple a little bit of an edge in this market again; right now, you can’t buy from Amazon MP3 on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If I were Amazon, I’d be figuring out a way to do that.

Technorati Tags: apple, installer.app, iphone

I hope Brent Simmons got a lot of money for selling NetNewsWire to NewsGator, because he’s thrown the software’s reputation to the wind.

I mostly read news on 2 machines, a Powerbook and a dual G5 at work. Sometimes I also use the iMac we have upstairs in the study. Sometimes I’m on a machine I don’t own with a web browser. What I want is the ability to read a feed item on one machine and have the other machines know that I’ve read it and not show it to me again as new.

If I subscribe to a feed on one machine, I want the others to know that and show me that feed when I read feeds on another machine.

In short, what I need is reliable synchronization across machines.

I don’t think these are particularly unique needs. But NetNewsWire can’t handle this scenario.

In the days when I ran emacs over a terminal connection to panix.com and read Usenet in gnus, this was easy. Whenever I quit, my .newsrc got updated with my read/unread counts, and that was that. It worked.

NetNewsWire once worked pretty well in terms of synchronization. I could synchronize my Bloglines subscriptions with it, and life was good.

Then NNW got sold to NewsGator, and I was magnaminously offered a free 2 year subscription to NewsGator online. Not only that, but they ALSO had an online newsreader, so I could still read either on my Powerbook, my work machine, or a web browser, if I happened to be away from my own machines.

So I switched over to NewsGator syncing.

It has been an utter disaster ever since. NewsGator’s web based reader is an horribly broken shitty piece of crap. I have just spent the last hour making multiple attempts at deleting a folder in my feeds list. I right-click the folder. I select “Delete folder.” The folder disappears. I wait a few minutes to see if the change “took.” I refresh the browser. The folder reappears.

I delete it again. I wait. I quit the browser. I restart the browser and go to the NewsGator reader. The folder is there again. I repeat the process. I quit that browser and open a different one. The folder is still there.

I decide to attack it from the NNW end. I open NNW and tell it to overwrite NewsGator. It merges the list with the online list. There’s the folder still.

During my many replacement attempts, NNW/NewsGator appears to do things in an entirely arbitrary manner, randomly deleting feeds and setting read/unread counts on my feeds.

I do not appear to be alone. A search for “sync” on NewsGator’s NNW support forum yields 178 topics. And from what I can see there, the support staff has no idea what’s going on either. The typical entry has a user complaning about the same sorts of things I am - basically, that the syncing is just plain broken. In one hapless schmuck’s case, after trying every last “fix” in the book, we get this total left-field Hail Mary play from the support guy:

This is just getting weird! Is there any chance that someone else could have your username/password and be using the account at another lcoation? We’ve seen this happen when people sell computers etc and leave the software on it.

Even if you don’t think that is the case, can you try changing your password in NewsGator Online, and also NNW and see if that helps at all.

Of course, in the next reply, the poor user says that that didn’t work either, and then all is silence. This is the worst kind of “support” - the kind where it’s everything and anything’s fault except the software’s. Among the excuses trotted out in the support forum is to check with your IT administrator to see if SOAP headers aren’t getting through your firewall, that people are closing the application before it has a chance to complete the sync, and that perennial favorite - you’re not using a current enough beta.

Google Reader may not be a river of news, take full advantage of Mac OS X services, or be up to Gruber-caliber HIG snuff, but it has one distinct and overriding advantage:

It works as advertised.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, netnewswire, newsgator, nnw, rss, web2.0

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: amazon unbox Goes Live

I’ll be interested in the first reviews of his (sic) product.

Ok, here’s a review:

First, and worst, doesn’t work with a Mac. Surprising for Amazon, and right there a deal-breaker. You can only watch on an XP PC. Can’t burn to DVD (except as a backup that won’t play in a DVD player, and librarians love DRM, right?) So I guess I’d say it sucks.
Technorati Tags: geek, amazon, library, stupid, mac