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April 19, 2004

Get a Mac, already!

Any Mac geek knows more than a couple Mac Voyeurs. They'd never buy a Mac, oh no, but they love to kvetch about how much their Mac-imitating Windows programs suck, whine that Apple has only ported iTunes to Windows (and not iCal, iPhoto, iMovie, etc...), and consistently try out shareware hacks designed to make over their Windows machine to look like it's running MacOS X.

Just get a Mac, already, willya? Geez.

Posted by jim at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

Apple Update

Aw, hell. Apple just blew out a whole lot of stuff for NAB2004. Don’t even want to try to detail it all: new versions of most digital video editing apps, a new motion graphics app, updated wireless networking software, updated iBooks and PowerBooks, and a new networked storage technology.

If I was a digital video geek in broadcasting, I’d be pretty excited. But I’m still dinking around with iMovie and iDVD.

The new iBooks are pretty hip, because you can now get an iBook (14” only) with a SuperDrive for burning DVDs. You can also get internal Bluetooth in an iBook. You can get more RAM (up to 1152MB). And the slowest CPU is a 1GHz G4. Really, the only limitations of the iBook series are the somewhat anemic 32MB of video RAM, the 1024x768 display, and the firmware-imposed limitation to mirroring-only for external displays (meaning you can’t run an iBook with monitor-spanning). Of course, being a firmware-imposed limit, there are ways around it. But no way around 1024x768. Ugh.

Updated PowerBooks are pure speed-bump and options-made-standard. 1.33-1.5Ghz. AirPort Extreme is standard. Bump from Radeon Mobile 9600 to 9700 with 64 or 128MB. SuperDrive is 4x instead of 2x.

The important question is: Am I still happy with the then-top-of-the-line 15” PowerBook G4 that I purchase back at the end of February, or do I wish I’d waited for updates? Yes, I’m happy, not at all regretful.

Posted by jim at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2004

Doing the Obvious

One of my ongoing projects at work has been allowing the HTML-impaired to update web content. Thus all the blather about lightweight/personal content systems.

I’ve already shimmed one MovableType “blog” into a quarterly newsletter where the TOC for a given issue is the Monthly Archive Index, the individual stories are the Individual Entry Archive pages (ordered by manually adjusting the authored-on date), and the Main Index is just an HTML redirect to the most recent Monthly Archive Index.

Right now, I’m getting ready to allow our Public Information guy to post news releases and stories - both internal and external - to our home page. The challenge has been the mixing of internal and external content. On the home page, we simply want a list of titles - and selecting the title should take you to the apropo content. That’s fine for internal content, we just enter the story into MT and it generates the pages - it’s easy for MT to generate that list. But what about external content - where we want the title selection to take the user to some external site? MovableType most always just wants to link to its own stories.

Thanks to a pointer from Caius, I found Brad Choate’s plugin for MovableType: IfEmpty. Simple, really - IfEmpty allows you, within an MT template, to test if a field is (or is not) empty, and tailor the output based on that. That was the piece I needed.

So now, when an entry is simply a link to outside content, my content person leaves the EntryBody blank and puts the URL in the Extended portion of the entry. The code knows that, if the body is blank but the extended portion isn’t, it should use that extended portion as the link URL when generating a list of entries. Voila.

I’m pleased. It’s simple and reasonably elegant, the user doesn’t have to jump through hoops. If you don’t spend time geeking on thing like MT, then you’re probably saying “What’s the big deal?”. Exactly. It shouldn’t be a big deal - and I’m pleased that it’s been solved in a way that isn’t a big deal.

Posted by jim at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2004

Anomalous Entries

Just discovered a few journal entries in an old notebook of mine. They’re not my handwriting…

Day One

Chickens in the dark lost their way

Day Five

Misplaced Chickens through time/space anomaly. Damn things are popping up like coffee vendors.

Day Three

Another time/space anomaly. Going back to day five after accrewing double-overtime. (wish pencil had spell-check)

Day Seven

Chickens almost covertly start microwbrewery. Not half bad.

Posted by jim at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2004

Usability is not cheap

Hot damn - John Gruber hits the nail on the head:

Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no.

It’s part of a longer rant decrying the attitude that UI is something you can graft on at the end of a gearhead project, rather than thinking about form the very beginning. And applies not just to software, but web development and most everything else where the intuitive nature of the interface just seems to be “right”. “Right” is a lot harder than it looks, kids.

Posted by jim at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)