Christopher Mackay’s Blog

I’ve noticed that the iTunes Music Store has multiple artists with the same name. Normally, with database-driven sites like iTMS, this isn’t a problem, since artists or song titles would have different IDs assigned to them.

But there are two bands called The Perishers, and two artists named John Williams (the composer of soundtracks like Star Wars and a blues guitarist — I don’t know what’s happened to the classical guitarist). The odd part is that they show up on the same iTMS pages as though they were the same artist.

Have you heard the news? Dell bought the CBC. Maybe there are other ads, too, but that’s the only one I ever see. Maybe it knows I surf CBC.ca from an HP desktop and an Apple PowerBook…

My point? CBC.ca should remain ad-free. CBC Television should become ad-free. CBC radio is, thankfully, ad-free.

Oh, and the lockout should be ended via binding arbitration. To paraphrase Mark Knopfler and Sting, I want my CBC.

This morning I was checking up on the news online while listening to iTunes when my dad invited me to an audio-chat.

When I accepted the invitation, iTunes automatically paused the current song in the background, and resumed it when we were done.

That’s the kind of thoughtfulness I’ve come to expect from Apple.

As if FEMA wasn’t taking enough flak lately, it turns out their emergency contact web site until very recently (as in post-Katrina) only allowed people using Internet Explorer for Windows in.

As Frank Hayes points out in his opinion column on Computerworld, Shame On FEMA…

…a little pain saved by a few software developers results in lots of pain for thousands of disaster victims.

Ordinarily, I’d call that irresponsible, poor development practice, maybe even incompetent. That’s when the cost would be measured in lost business.

But when this sort of foul-up locks out people in desperate need of help, it’s not just irresponsible. It’s unconscionable. It’s shameful.

Would the word criminal be hyperbole in this case?

From eWeek.com:

eWeek: Some Microsoft critics say that many of the features in “Longhorn” already exist in other operating systems. How do you respond to that?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: I don’t hear that from enterprise customers. They don’t look at the Mac. They just don’t. Some people will say some of the features are kissing cousins to features they’ve seen elsewhere, and that is true. I’m not apologetic about the fact that we should, in a way that doesn’t offend anyone else’s intellectual property, study and learn and benefit from the work others have done.

So, is this the final proof that Steve Ballmer is off his nut, or that he thinks his enterprise customers are? I mean, wasn’t there some lawsuit about this? Doesn’t Microsoft vigourously defend its own intellectual property? How does perceived lack of customer overlap make it okay for Microsoft to “benefit from” Apple’s products, like Mac OS X?

Bill Gates has announced that Windows Vista (in a bewildering array of editions) and Office 12 will be released in the second half of 2006, amidst “the largest marketing activity that we’ve ever had”.

Against the backdrop of what CNN Money calls “the longest gap ever between major releases of Windows operating systems” — XP is now four years old — all Microsoft seems to be offering is warmed-over Mac OS X: semi-transparent windows, real-time search, and a brushed-metal interface for Office 12.

Then there’s Internet Explorer 7, which will reportedly include tabbed browsing and better CSS rendering. Like every other browser. Oh, and a brushed-metal interface,

It’s interesting that Apple chose to innovate its way out of the economic downturn, while Microsoft is choosing to market its way out the increasingly common perception that it’s playing catch-up with Google, Apple and open-source.

Plus ça change…

A joke-telling hurricane:

“Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, was nominated by President Bush in 2003 and plans to start the job any day now.” — Jon Stewart

“Experts say it could take 80 days to drain all of the flood water out of New Orleans. When President Bush heard this he said, ‘80 days? That’s half a vacation!’ ” — Conan O’Brien

“He could have started planning on Saturday when the radar showed that a hurricane was going to hit the city, but Bush thinks that the jury is still out on weather forecasting.” — Bill Maher

“To his credit, President Bush did respond quickly and he did send troops… as soon as he found out Louisiana had oil.” — Jay Leno

Source: About.com (via CNN.com)

CNN.com also quoted comic D.L. Hughley, who “noted how many New Orleans residents were religious, and chose to stay behind while putting their faith in God: ‘Sometimes God sends the weatherman to say there’s a Level 5 hurricane. Sometimes Al Roker is God.’”

Scott Berkin, former interface designer for Microsoft, who left the Internet Explorer team in 1999, comments on what he likes and dislikes in his new browser of choice; Firefox.

Oh, in case you haven’t yet — get Firefox.

Apple’s Spotlight search technology is a marquee addition to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and it mostly lives up to the hype.

It’s not perfect, though.

There are a number of Spotlight implementations, some of which have very limited focus. These include

• the blue magnifying glass in the system menubar
• search within Mail.app
• the full Spotlight window (invoked via Command-Option-Spacebar)
• the search field at the top of all Finder windows, and
• my personal favorite: System Preferences’ search field.

There is also the ability to save searches as “Smart Folders” in the Finder and in Mail.

The problems

The menubar implementation and the full Spotlight window version both suffer from the fact that they present results before the search is complete. While it’s nice to get results quickly, it’s frustrating to be forced to play whack-a-file as the results (and their order in the list) constantly change to reflect more appropriate results that take precedence.

I find it especially odd that the search field in the full Spotlight window is in the top-right corner, but the visual feedback that the search progress is ongoing is a nearly-invisible, low-contrast spinning symbol on the opposite side of the window. That’s a long way away on a large monitor.

Like Dashboard, the full Spotlight window is treated differently from anything else in the OS. Exposé treats it like a full application, in that F10 isolates its window, but Command-Tab fails to reveal it in the list of running apps. This suggests that it belongs to the Finder, or perhaps to whatever app was front-most when it was invoked, but cycling through the current app’s windows with Command-Tilde fails to bring it forward. Very odd.

Saved searches in Mail, a variation on the Finder’s Smart Folders, don’t seem to work well in my experience, although others have suggested remedies.

Final Thoughts

Spotlight represents a major advance over previous Mac OS X search technologies, but there are too many inconsistencies in how it’s deployed. It brings more depth to search results, it’s fast, and helpful. It hasn’t caused me to “stop filing” — not by a long shot — but it has made it easier to find files. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it?

Time magazine is running a story on the iPod nano with Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives interviewed.