Category: apple

We are all dual-booters

Today’s personal computers basically run two distinct operating systems: the native host OS (Windows/Mac/Linux or iPhone/Android/etc) and the web.

Web apps have solved all kinds of problems that are still poorly handled by most native systems: apps automatically update every time you use them, they manage their own library dependencies, there’s a security sandbox that lets you run pretty much anything without concern that it’s going to eat your system (unless your browser is buggy!)

Let’s face it: most of us probably spend a lot of our time in the web, and even if they’re not doing everything that’s where a lot of action is. Some folks have used this as a sort of excuse for the extreme control some platforms exercise over software publishers – “don’t like the rules? Make a web app, you can do anything!” 

But web apps are still much more limited in some areas. Access to hardware is rare (cameras, audio recording, scanners, attached storage). Communication between apps is greatly complicated by that sandbox, and shared data on the host machine like contact lists and photo archives may be completely inaccessible without a host-specific shim. (Most impressive thing I’ve seen is a bank web site that did deposit via scanned check image, using a signed Java applet to hook into native scanner support. It only worked on Windows, alas.) Background processing is very limited, and most web apps give up on directly notifying you of new activity and just send you email, hoping you’ve got something else that’ll tell you there’s new mail.

There’s a lot of great activity going on in and around HTML5 these days that’s getting better graphics support, faster code execution, etc. But the things that really bring the web native are going to be about access to shared hardware and data resources.

Some good things have been coming in such as touch and orientation events in Mobile Safari, but there’s a long way to go. My pet peeve: I find it pretty surprising that HTML file upload controls don’t trigger something useful like the camera roll on the iPhone/iPad or the Android browser. I can’t believe nobody has thought of this, so I’ll assume for now that the various browser folks just ain’t gotten to it yet… Anybody feel like starting on patches for Android’s Browser and the mobile branch of Firefox? :)

Game review: Myst for iPhone

So while fiddling around with the iPad I picked up for testing, I thought “hey self, this would be a great platform for an exploration/adventure game like the classic 1993 CD-ROM game Myst!”

To my great pleasure, i discovered that Cyan released a iPhone/iPod Touch version of the original Myst last year, which also runs quite nicely on the newer iPad.

The game features a richly detailed CG-rendered environment (all pre-rendered graphics thanks to 1993’s paltry CPU horsepower), where you wander around trying to piece together the history of a family power struggle that has trapped the denizens of a world where writing can literally create new universes.

Back in the 90s, the graphics, videos, and music filled an entire CD to the brim; the iPhone version weighs in at a similar 540 megabytes or so, which by today’s standards is a reasonable download. :)

The still graphics have been slightly rescaled from the Mac SE-friendly 512×384 or so down to 480×320, but appear to be from true color originals rather than the dithered 256-color versions of yore. Some screens have been further zoomed in to make small touch targets more accessible, but I still find it a bit awkward on an iPhone.

In pixel-doubled mode on the iPad, everything looks great and navigating by touch is a joy; the cleaner true color images outweigh the slight resolution loss for me, and it’s just the right size to go pushing things on.

My one big wish might be for an integrated note-taking feature. (Some of the later games in the series actually added a screen-shot feature, presented in-game as a camera!) On a 1990s desktop computer I could easily keep my notes on paper, but a portable tablet cries out for taking the notes on the tablet too, so they’re with me whenever I feel like poking at the game for a few minutes. Fortunately the game is great about saving and restoring state automatically, and starts up in just a couple seconds, so switching between the game and Notes or Photos isn’t too unpleasant. (Better multitasking on the system could help here too by keeping state live while you’re away in your notes.)

I would really love to see Myst’s sequels brought to tablets like the iPad natively; the higher-resolution graphics in Riven would look *fantastic*, and the iPad should have enough horsepower to handle the fancier video and panoramic effects in Mysts III and IV. I still need to finish IV and play V though… ;)

Probably the biggest obstacle to the later games is storage space. Pre-rendering graphics from every possible view position and direction let them have visuals years ahead of their time, but at a huge cost in disk space. Riven should be tractable, but full downloads could run many gigabytes for the later games, which spanned multiple DVDs!

Summary:

  • Game:Myst for iPhone
  • Genre: graphical adventure/exploration/puzzle
  • Platform: iPhone OS (low resolution)
  • Cost: $4.99
  • Awesome factor: pretty awesome
  • Nostalgia factor: pretty big but not overwhelming the awesome
  • Recommend? yes!

Note: typing html tags manually on the iPad keyboard is pretty awful, as letters, slash, and angle brackets are all on different screens. I’d really appreciate working rich text editing in Mobile Safari!

More AT&T games

Good news 1: AT&T is exchanging their ‘unlimited’ $30/month iPhone data plan for a $15 200 MB/month and $25 2GB/month plan, with relatively sane overage handling.

This is good because AT&T’s been blaming a lot of its woes on out-of-control data usage by iPhone users exceeding their network capacity in the most crowded markets. If they’re actually charging based on usage, the incentive structure changes from them wanting to minimize our data usage [pushing costs down] to wanting to make it as attractive as possible to actually use the network [pushing revenue up, rewarding infrastructure buildout].

That means AT&T is more likely to give people things they want, and I can’t say a bad thing about that.

Good news 2: AT&T will finally start offering iPhone tethering (11 months behind schedule) for an extra $20/month on top of the 2 GB/month plan.

Adding tethering is a must for AT&T as the US exclusive iPhone carrier to compete with Android phones, which can already tether on any network without jailbreaking and will soon have the feature officially in the OS.

These exclusive carrier agreements are horrible for consumers; it took this long for a competing phone to catch up enough to actually push AT&T into action. If we’d instead had an open phone market, so you could buy any phone and use it on any network, we’d have had somebody offering official consumer-friendly tethering the second the iPhone 3Gs was announced.

Bad news: That $20/month doesn’t actually get you anything real — you have the same 2 GB limit that you’re already paying for, but you’re more likely to reach or exceed the limit. If the issue is data limits, why do I need to pay extra to NOT get a bigger limit? This is particularly silly if customers can tether for free on any other network, or on the same network with any other phone, or on the same network with the same phone if they jailbreak the software. Hello?

But let’s give AT&T props for baby steps — they’ve already been offering similar smartphone tethering plans that don’t add anything to your data caps for their other smartphones, so that’s what they know.

What it probably does for me is to make me feel less guilty about considering getting the poorly-advertised unlimited international smartphone data plan ‘without tethering’ and then using tethering anyway on my Android-based Nexus One. It’s enough money that I’d feel like I’m paying for my US tethering during the months that I don’t have any international travel. :P

Apple Doesn’t Want Developers?

Ok, now this is just confusing:

By now, most of you have probably seen or heard about Apple iPhone SDK 4.0 and a little hidden gem in their freshly minted 4.0 Terms of Services, notably 3.3.1:

“Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.”

It’s clear that products like Titanium, Unity3D, Ansca, MonoTouch and others are now a bit in question for iPhone 4.0+ with this language. We’re all trying to get our heads around what this means and trying to reach out to Apple to get clarification.

I called up Apple to ask for details about how this affects Appcelerator & Unity3d as particular examples that I’d been planning to use for games and utilities, and whether I can get a refund for my program fees if I were to not accept the updated agreement.

The rep was very pleasant and polite and took my information to escalate the question; the CSRs of course don’t have immediate answers for this. I was told someone should get back to me within 24 hours.

If y’all also call, please above all be polite — customer service reps are real people too, and they didn’t write the agreement! Be polite, accept being on hold gracefully, let them know how this would affect your future development plans, and be specific about what questions you’re asking and what answers you need.

Compiling PHP on Snow Leopard

If you’ve been having trouble compiling your own PHP installations on Mac OS X 10.6, here’s the secret to making it not suck! After running the configure script, edit the generated Makefile and make these fixes:

  • Find the EXTRA_LIBS definition and add -lresolv to the end
  • Find the EXE_EXT definition and remove .dSYM

Standard make and make install should work from here…

For reference, here’s the whole configure line I currently use; MySQL is installed from the downloadable installer; other deps from MacPorts:

‘./configure’ ‘–prefix=/opt/php52’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql’ ‘–with-zlib’ ‘–with-bz2’ ‘–enable-mbstring’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–enable-fastcgi’ ‘–with-xmlrpc’ ‘–with-xsl’ ‘–with-readline=/opt/local’ –without-iconv –with-gd –with-png-dir=/opt/local –with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local –with-curl –with-gettext=/opt/local –with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config –with-tidy=/opt/local –enable-pcntl –with-openssl

Epic sort fail

Was transferring some screen shots from my iPhone with Mac OS X’s “Image Capture” app when I discovered that the sort-by-date seems to have some problems:

epic-sort-fail

Yes, it’s sorting by ASCII string value of the formatted date. 3/4 comes after 3/22, and 3/22/08 comes after 3/20/09. How’d Steve Jobs let this one out the door? I can only assume nobody had a memory card or camera with old photos on it when they tested…

Blast from the past: Mac vs Linux desktop

Aiee!

Clearing out old backups, I stumbled on this half-written blog post from 2004 about my “switch”.

While they may not be the most earthshaking issues, I’m disappointed that things have not changed much in four years — I hit the same stumbling blocks when playing with my Linux netbook today…

Last October I got a PowerBook. I’d been mainly a Linux ‘n’ BSD guy for years, bouncing between Gnome, KDE, and alternative desktops every few months, though I’d been using Mac OS X at work for some months.

Instantly the little PB became my sole desktop environment — my poor x86 box sat unused for weeks at a time except as a file server or occasional test machine, despite sporting a faster processor and whatnot.

What was so darn great about the Mac, other than just that it was portable?

I still do much of my file management at a bash prompt rather than in Finder (and I’ve never much liked Nautilus or Konqueror).

Things that are darned good:

Application launching

The way the dock works in Mac OS X is just darn great. Sure there are corner cases where things go wonky, but most of the time it’s the way I like it. Things to note:

  • It’s very easy to keep a running application permanently in the dock.

You started something up once or twice, then you decide you’re going to want it all the time and have it available for easy launching. On the Mac, you just drag its icon to the place on the dock where you’d most like to have it.

That’s it.

Nothing more.

No five-level-deep right-click context menu[1]. No trying to figure out the correct command line and which of five ‘standard’ icon directories they stashed the application’s icon in. No hunting down the secret ‘remote’ launcher command so that multiple invocations work correctly.

[1] I’m not shitting you about five levels. That’s how many levels of popup menus I actually had on screen adding Konqueror to my Gnome launcher panel.

OH HOW I WISH this were as easy in Gnome and KDE. Just sort of hope that a .desktop file was installed for you and pray it’s somewhere you can find it.

Even once you’ve got something in your panel/kicker your pain is not over. Rearranging items in the panels is a horrible experience and often ends up with ugly, uneven spacing, stuck drag modes, or other annoyances. Drag and drop sometimes works.

Application switching

After months with the Mac I can’t imagine anymore how anyone lives with a taskbar model. Virtual desktops are necessary just to keep the taskbar manageable. Yuck!

I simply haven’t missed virtual desktops on the Mac. (If I wanted them, there are third party apps that do it.) Nor do I use Exposé very frequently. (But it looks neat!) Most of the time I find it quite sufficient to just switch between applications with command+tab.

The distinction I need to point out is between switching applications on the Mac and switching windows in Gnome/KDE/Windows. I’ll generally be for instance switching between a text editor and a browser (with documentation, say). Having fewer applications to deal with rather than ten billion windows makes this usually a little more manageable.

But, to each their own.

Application distribution

The typical application distribution model on Linux is “the operating system vendor will distribute the app.”

From there I presumably would have gone on to whinge about dependency hell, the virtual impossibility of manual uninstallation of apps from the Unix filesystem hierarchy, and other desktop integration difficulties when installing third-party software.

Dell Mini love

We finally replaced my fiancée’s ancient PC with a shiny new Dell laptop. While ordering, I couldn’t help myself and tossed in a Inspiron Mini 9 for myself:

This little cutie weighs in at just 2.26 pounds, less than half of my MacBook’s hefty 5 pounds. I’ve found that the Mini is much more back-friendly than my MacBook; I can painlessly lug it to the office with my laptop bag slung over my shoulder (easier for getting on and off the subway) instead of nerding it up in backpack mode.

The top-end model I picked packs 16GB storage and 1GB RAM running on a 1.6 GHz Atom processor — far more powerful than the computer I took with me to college in 1997. Admittedly, my iPhone also beats that computer at 8GB/128MB/300MHz vs 6.4GB/64MB/266MHz. :P

The compact form factor does have some impact on usability, though. The 1024×600 screen sometimes feels too tight for vertical space, but they include a handy full-screen zoom hotkey for the window manager which opens things up.

The keyboard feels a bit cramped, and some of the keys are in surprising places (the apostrophe and hyphen are frequent offenders), but it’s still a lot easier to type serious notes or emails on than the iPhone. I had to disable the trackpad’s click and scrolling options to keep from accidentally pasting random text with my palms while typing…

The machine shipped with a customized Ubuntu distribution which is fully functional; they include a “friendly” launcher app which can be easily disabled, and even the launcher doesn’t interfere too badly. The desktop launch bar that’s crept into Gnome nicely handles my “I need Spotlight to launch stuff with the keyboard” fix. :) Firefox works fine (after uninstalling lots of Yahoo! extensions), Thunderbird installed easily enough, and I even got Skype to work with my USB headset! (AT&T’s international roaming charges can bite me…)

The biggest obstacle for me to use this machine every day is my Yojimbo addiction. I use Yojimbo for darn near everything — random notes, travel plans, budgeting, grocery lists, recipes, encrypted password stores, saving articles and documentation for future references. It’s insanely easy to use, the search works, I don’t have to remember where I saved anything, and it syncs across all my Macs. But… it’s Mac-only. :(

I’m trying out WebJimbo, which provides an AJAX-y web interface for remotely accessing your Yojimbo notes. It’s very impressive for what it does, but I’m hitting some nasty brick walls: editing a note with formatting drops all the formatting, but I use embedded screen shots and coloring extensively in my notes.

I’ve seen some reports of people hacking Mac OS X onto the Dell Mini — very tempting to avoid OS switching overhead. :) But I think if I really want that, eventually I should just suck it up and buy a MacBook Air. The form factor is the same as my MacBook (full keyboard, roomier 1280×800 screen), but at 3 pounds it’s much closer to the Mini than to my regular MacBook in weight, so should be about as back-friendly for the subway commute and air travel.

Of course, the Air costs $1799 and I got my tricked-out Mini for about $400, so… I’ll save my pennies and see. ;)

Bloggin’ from iPhone

Dude, there’s a WordPress posting app for iPhone… Tee-hee! (it’s open source too, assuming Apple doesn’t crush the developer over the mysterious SDK NDA …)

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