Christopher Mackay's Blog

As seen on Reddit:

• Google Maps link, east of Medecine Hat, AB…

Took me a minute to see it. It’s just too weird.

Since downloading iTunes 7, it’s been crashing regularly — which is something I’m not used to experiencing under Mac OS X.

When the first release of iTunes 7.0 came out, there were a lot of complaints about stability, which apparently affected Windows users the most. It was stable for me, though. The latest version, 7.0.1 (7), has been quite irritating.

This is very good news. Now if only there was a way to run IE6 & IE7 side-by-side on one box…

IEBlog: Details on our CSS changes for IE7

I recently purchased a live album from iTMS Canada, and it was horrible. It dates from the mid-80s, and it sounds like an audience bootleg (very narrow dynamic range, clearly-audible individual audience members). If it had been advertised as a bootleg…

• I would’ve thought it sounded pretty good for a 20-year-old audience recording
• It wouldn’t have been on the iTunes Music Store in the first place

Upon further investigation, I noticed that there was no label indicated on iTunes, and that the album’s title doesn’t follow the band’s titling practices, and the album isn’t listed in the discography on their official web site. Caveat emptor.

But Apple came through. I complained to iTMS support, and got a prompt refund for the full purchase amount.

Dreamweaver 8 Complaints

Yes, I know Dreamweaver 9 is coming soon; the feature set is long-since locked. It’s too late. But many of these problems date back to earlier versions of Dreamweaver, and if nothing else, I need to vent a bit. Maybe others have experienced these problems, and maybe someone at Adobe will pay attention where no one at Macromedia did.

Dreamweaver Site Window Issues

• Dreamweaver is constantly generating files with filenames like: e18cc8ad, 4e568d08, 45fa4af6, 6db74297, 793d81d4, 7ca438b5, dceca0da, 0bb2a5d9, 02fe8ce8, etc. I have 34 of these in my trash right now. These are the only files without suffixes in a site; I don’t know why these can’t be deleted on Quit, or deleted automatically, if indeed they must be created in the first place.
• Deleting files from the keyboard usually stops working partway through an editing session. Once it fails the first time, it won’t start working again until Dreamweaver is Quit and relaunched.
• “Select all checked out files” has, to my knowledge, never selected all checked out files. There are always stragglers. Specifically, it seems to ignore any files in closed folders in the Files window. Either rename the command “Irritatingly Select some random checked-out files”, delete the command, or fix it. Please.
• Moving files around within the site window sometimes fails to update links to those files, even if it prompts to update links (and you agree).
• When “rubber-banding” to select a target (e.g. a link or an image), the file you’re working in sometimes doesn’t pop back in front of the site window. Sometimes it will, though. This is a new ‘feature’ in DW8. The best part is figuring out which of the seven “index.php” files listed at the bottom of the Window menu is the one you were working on (BBEdit manages to helpfully show the filepath in the menu; why can’t Dreamweaver?)
• DW is supposed to check for remote changes when you open the local copy of the file but, inexplicably, sometimes it does not, causing other users’ changes to be deleted. This can, and has been, disastrous.
• Some sites refuse to close folders in the Site window; this may be associated with the presence of .flv files (see QuickTime screen-capture below):

• The “Open With…” contextual menu NEVER remembers that Photoshop or BBEdit exist (although it doesn’t have trouble remembering FireWorks), and will complain that there isn’t enough memory to open BBEdit (which is typically already open, and my current system has 2 GB of RAM). This has been an irritance since, I dunno, Dreamweaver 1.2?
• Using Expos?ɬ
  
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You know, I may not have an MBA, but I don’t think I’d go advising a company with 40% margins to “quit the business”:

• Gartner: Apple should quit hardware business

This reminds me of a presentation given in Fredericton a couple of years ago when Dr. Lyne Bouchard of Gartner said, in answer to an audience question following her presentation that (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘open-source software wasn’t really robust enough to use in an enterprise setting.’

To paraphrase Paul Graham, tell that to Google, Yahoo! and eBay.