Elements or Lower

It’s so good to have the iPhone back after a month with a horribly cracked screen, and this weekend afforded us the opportunity to use the GPS tracking in the maps application as we tried to navigate Milton Keynes.

And, of course, the weekend afforded the opportunity to download a bunch of iPhone apps. My favourite so far? Vicinity, which uses the GPC to provide lists of relevant Wikipedia articles, Flickr photos, banks, shops, restaurants and other local facilities based on your current location. Here’s one of the top Flickr photos for our home in Greenwich. Isn’t that just beautiful?

But I’d very much like to put a wish out there and see if the cosmos responds. There’s one app that would be really, hugely useful to me when I’m away from the studio, and that (with email) would reassure me that I could deal with work emergencies even while I’m travelling.

And that’s a SSH client. Sure, entering command line incantations using a tiny keyboard is hardly ideal, but at least it would then be possible to reboot Apache, check the contents of a MySQL database or even tweak site code if absolutely necessary, something that I’ve sorely missed on some holidays I’ve been on. It turns out that I’m not alone in wanting this.

I’d actually quite like a separate MySQL client app too, not unlike the venerable CocoaMySQL, but then I fear I’d be veering into pony territory.

In no particular order:

• Yes, 10.5.2 fixed much of my beef with Leopard, but there remains some issues I’d dearly like to see fixed with Spaces. In particular, dragging windows from one space to another using the Exposé-like overview screen has a nasty habit of moving all the windows for that app rather than just the individual window selected. This doesn’t happen when dragging windows off the sides of the screen, but doing this is much slower, particularly when trying to move a window diagonally across spaces. We’re so very nearly there on this, though, and someone in Cupertino needs a big hug for fixing Stacks.

• I’m right there with Elliot Jay Stocks: I love Things too. Unlike Mr Stocks, however, I find the project and areas features completely invaluable. My work life generally involves looking after a number of websites, for which development projects come and go. So, I’ve set Things up to have a different area for each site I (help) manage, each containing a variety of day-to-day items and a handful of larger projects. I then use tags to divide tasks into broader groups: design, code, writing, debug. So far, this is working brilliantly.

• For what it’s worth, you can now find me on Twitter.

It’s been said that I loves me some Apple. It’s been said that I’ll run out and buy any old crap they release. It’s been said that I’ve got a tattoo of Steve Jobs on one buttock, and a tattoo of myself on the other, such that when I clench it looks like they kiss.

These things have been said. But with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, it seems that my miniature Steve has kicked me sharply in the back of the balls with his tiny, inky foot, for Leopard is just one big daily regret.

My irritants, let me show you them:

• The pointless translucency of the menu bar. This isn’t eye candy, it’s eye manure. Even with a much-welcomed salve, the anti-aliasing is still noticeably worse than the rest of the system. It’s like someone at Apple saw the ridiculous, illegible window chrome in Vista and thought “Gee, Microsoft have hit the aesthetic zeitgeist with that one: all aboard the shitwagon!” At least they haven’t changed the font yet to Marker Felt, though I feel sure it’s coming, like another testicular jab from illustrated Steve’s perineal boot.

• Stacks. Much has been written about how Stacks is broken, all of it true. Just to ramp up the gall, when you drag a folder with a lovely custom icon to nestle in the Dock, you’re treated to an animation of its own icon transforming into the collection of its contents’ icons. Oh, look what you could have won. To try to ameliorate this, some plucky soul put together an assortment of drawer icons, which have the upside of making each stack distinguishable from all the other Stacks, and the abundant downside of always being there when you open the stack — into either a cramp-inducing fan or a comedy grid where giant icons loom over inadequate, truncated text labels. Here’s my alternative icon to put at the head of a stack.

• I’m going to harp on about Stacks, actually, because the old behaviour was a source of not inconsiderable joy to me, joy which Apple has punctured like a schoolyard bully with a flick-knife. You see, I’d keep a selection of oft-used folders down there, and would frequently mouse down to open one conveniently and quickly. No more. Yes, I could create a stack of aliases to these folders, but that’s two clicks and a bunch of muttering. Or I could put aliases on the Desktop and use Exposé to clear the windows out of the way to get to them. Or I could just drive a staple into my leg and throw curses toward the East Coast. Hallelujah that dragging an alias into the Dock gets you halfway there, the other half being the hierarchical menu of folder contents you used to get when right-clicking.

• I hate the 3D Dock, with its confused perspectives, annoying reflections and exaggerated shadows, and I frankly hate the new 2D Dock too. Many application icons are designed to work best over a pale background, since that’s generally what one finds in a folder view in the Finder. The great thing about the Tiger Dock was that it was a simple, elegant pale sheet beneath the icons. The new 2D Dock is a black smudge at the bottom of the screen, making icons murky and indistinct, and even then trying to draw attention to itself with an excessive border.

• Spaces promised much, but delivers only frustration. Thanks to the glory of Desktop Manager, I’ve used virtual desktops for a couple of years now. Generally, I have a desktop open with a collection of windows for each project I’m working on at a given time — a TextMate window, a Transmit window, a Terminal window. Any letter, as long as it’s T. But with Spaces, this seems impossible. If you set up one desktop and then move to the next, the moment you switch to TextMate to open a new project, you’re shuttled back to the first space. OK, you say, why not set TextMate to open in all spaces? Ah, but then when you change space, the TextMate window follows you into the new space, like a little yapping chihuahua. So, off goes Spaces, and back on goes the elderly Desktop Manager.

• My printer is behaving badly, but that might be Oki’s fault.

• Leopard includes Apache 2, but not mod_perl 2, and I’m led to believe it’s difficult to get it to install correctly.

• I lament for Volume Logic with the passion of an effeminate teen under a blanket.

On the bright side, at least Mail now allows you to forward messages as an attachment, tempting me away from the smashing orangeyness of GyazMail. The final feature of GyazMail that I’d sorely miss is its ability to attach a Finder-label style colour to a message (which I use for “Urgent Action”, “Action”, “Reference” etc). I know that one can use rules in Mail to achieve the same thing, and perversely, to assign arbitrary colours to messages using the Show Colours menu option — but were someone to create a Mail plugin that allowed assignment of Finder-label colours to messages from a toolbar icon, and further allowed these colours to become criteria in a Smart Folder, I swear I’d love them longtime. Alternatively, GyazMail could acquire smart folders and let me use Spotlight to find messages, but that seems even less likely.

I must go. Buttocky Steve requires nourishment.

Okay, I’ve got a whole bunch of proper stuff I want to write about, but in the meantime just let me say that not only is this page part of a, frankly, awe-inspiring review of Tiger, and that I’ve come to agree with nearly everything John Siracusa says, but also that the movie on that particular page is sheer genius in every way. Thanks.

Footnote 2 on the US site is the best thing I’ve read in months, and it’s almost as funny on the UK site.

The widely-anticipated new text editor for Mac OS X, TextMate has now been launched.

I’ve been using SubEthaEdit as my main editor for some months now, and so it’s hard to distinguish what’s a genuine point of comparison from what’s simply a case of having to unlearn old habits. But there are a few small features in SubEthaEdit that I know I’d sorely miss if I were to switch to TextMate wholesale.

1. The ability to tint the background colour for text that I’ve changed. It’s so useful to know what I’ve touched in a file when looking for bugs, particularly when edits in a single session are dotted around a variety of different subroutines.

3. SubEthaEdit creates a function popup at the top of the window that you can use to jump to a given block. In Perl, this is a list of named subroutines. It’s great to open a file and be able to jump straight to the subroutine you’re looking for.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some great stuff evident in TextMate right from half an hour’s playing with it. In particular:

1. Being able to “fold” blocks down to their opening definition to get them out of the way. This seemed a little buggy when I tried it in one of my Perl modules, but that might simply be because there isn’t a Perl mode (or “bundle”) yet.

2. Columnar selections.

3. Being able to conduct a regexp-based search-and-replace across a number of files at once.

4. Macros and snippets.

5. Auto-completion of brackets and so forth.

Similarly, there are niggles with each.

• TextMate’s function to shift a line left or right works from the point that the selection starts, rather than acting on the whole line. So, if you’re trying to indent an entire block, you have to make sure you select the block right from the very beginning of the first line, or you might introduce a gap in the middle of some code.

• TextMate has no preferences panel. None. Having said that, I’ve just noticed that the application remembers any changes you make to the display font for the next time you launch the program, which is considerable mitigation.

Of course, TextMate has only just been released, so it’s hardly fair to criticise it too strongly it on the basis of a couple of irritants that may well get fixed. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing any Perl bundle that gets released, as without this, I really can’t form a comprehensive judgement for my own needs.

But, ultimately, although TextMate has delivered on its hype impressively, I suspect that the things I like most about SubEthaEdit may become deal-breakers for me.

From LoudThinking:

TextMate is the answer to all my editing prayers. There I’ve said it. TextMate has single-handedly rendered TextEdit and Xcode obsolete, contained Subethaedit to strictly collaborative tasks, and stopped me from feeling sorry about not liking BBEdit. Yes, it’s that good.

Oooh!

Apple have today redesigned the layout of the iMix opening page in the iTunes Music Store, dividing the screen into three columns: Top Rated, Most Recent and Featured.

It’s a pissy little thrill, but both my iMixes are right there on the front page in the Featured column.

I’m not sure what’s happened to this story from GrokLaw, but as viewed this morning in my copy of NetNewsWire some fantastic neologisms seem to have appeared — notably legalthreat and Linuxenemy.

It’s so tempting to register linuxenemy.com as a gag domain and point it at SCO, it really is.

…and, hot on the heels of yesterday’s news, today I discover that GyazMail 1.2 has been released.

I really like GyazMail — so much so that I bought it without ever really putting mail.app through its paces. It works more-or-less in the way that I’m accustomed to an email client working, but the big missing feature for me was always junk mail filtering. mail.app had its own junk mail filter, and most other clients on OS X already integrated with SpamSieve — except GyazMail. This had always been in the list of future plans, though, so I contented myself with some homespun filters and rules and waited.

Well, I’m very glad to say that the new release finally includes incredibly straightforward integration with SpamSieve, and a swathe of other new features (like Finder-style coloured labels for messages) that I’m frankly delighted about. Now, if only I could stop the SpamSieve icon from sullying the Aqua goodness of my dock, I’d be truly content.