Jeremey's Weblog

Aperture

Well I may have to eat my words. Aperture looks very, very cool. It's worth watching all of the quicktime previews, they go into a fair bit of detail and it looks really amazing. It won't replace Photoshop, but I think it could easily become the hub of a photographer's workflow, invoking Photoshop only for the more occasional deep edit (nothing will replace B&W conversions using the channel mixer, or Lab mode, etc.).

Restoring from Apple's Backup

I used Apple's Backup 3 to backup stuff from my hard drive right before it died for good (it gave some warnings, thankfully). I was having trouble restoring things that are owned by the system, so I emailed Apple support, and they told me a very cool thing: inside a backup "file" (really it's a package) is a mountable disk image! So you can "show package contents", then navigate down to where the disk image is, double-click, and there's your backup as a drive... you can then drag whatever you want off, however you like. Very cool!

New Eisley EP on iTunes

There's a new Eisley EP on iTunes (released today). I don't see it under their band name, but searching will find it (Head Against the Sky), or click here. If you're an Eisley fan, go get it. If not, shame on you... at least a little. :)

Iain Duotone

Thank You, Apple

Apple made me extremely happy... they had my Powerbook back to me in just over 48 hours from when I dropped it off. They replaced the hard drive and noticed that the battery was eligible for a free replacement and did so. Awesome. They didn't put it quite back in a virgin state, so I had to do a bit of hackery to get the first-time setup to run, but I learned a bunch of useful stuff (like how to boot to single user mode, how to use NetInfo Manager to chainsaw my way around, etc.).

Sigur Ros

Wow... this song and this video are brilliant:

http://www.emichrysalis.co.uk/quicktime/sigur_ros/glosoli/index.php?version=7.030&bandwidth=38400

Apologies to them for my inadequate i18n skilz (the name of the band has non-English letters).

No 'stros, Por Favor

Please, noone mention the Astros. Please? :) I don't want to think about it, let alone talk about it or read about it.

MacInShop

Well my poor Powerbook is in the shop... its hard drive decided to croak. Ugh! At least it gave some warning (meaning it croaked, then came back for a brief while, twice) so I was able to back up a bunch of stuff (notably the 30GB of iTunes stuff and my audio projects). Should be back in a week. I'm taking this as an opportunity to learn to loathe XP even more than before. Thunderbird and Firefox are very useable on XP, though, which is refreshing, and the 3GHz Xeon doesn't hurt.

Video Podcasting

Well I made my first video podcast... amazingly cool! With the 7.0.3 update of Quicktime Pro, it includes an export option for iPod/iTunes format (basically 320x240, 30 fps, H.264, 128k or 160k AAC audio). So fire up the digital video cam, import into iMovie, make a short film, export to iPod format, upload to web server somewhere, post link to blog. The missing ingredient is Feedburner, which will take your regular blog with links and generate an iTunes-compatible RSS feed with enclosures for all the video or audio links. Awesome.

Anyway, here's my podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BarrettFamilyPodcast

Open iTunes, choose Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, and paste (first, go get iTunes 6 and Quicktime 7.0.3 if you haven't already).

Of Mac Browsers

Apple Matters has an article about maybe ditching Safari in favor of some other browser on the Mac. Personally, I find Safari the most tolerable of all the Mac browsers, for a few reasons:

• I love its simple RSS support... I don't subscribe to thousands of blogs or news feeds, just 10-20, 5-10 of which are friends... I have two RSS folders on the bookmark bar and I can see at a glance what's new
• Generally it's less resource-intensive than any of the Mozilla browsers
• Attention to detail: nitpick UI issues bother me, Safari has the least rough edges of all the browsers I've used
• It's generally quite fast
• Downloads work in an intelligent way (the Mozilla-based browsers have a nice download window, but they interact very poorly with the filesystem)
• Good plugins (PithHelmet, etc.)

For my "real job", I'm one of the lead developers on a security gateway product, and it so happens that this product does an enormous amount of URL rewriting and web page tweaking on content flowing through the box... so we've become very familiar with the quirks of various browsers. My loosely collected observations are as follows:

• Firefox generally has the best DOM/DHTML/Javascript implementation; it is the most consistently correct
• Firefox doesn't get it all right
• The portable UI (XUL) in Mozilla land is painful on a Mac... it doesn't come anywhere near meeting "good Mac UI" standards
• Camino is a nice alternative that implements the Gecko (Mozilla) engine inside a native Mac UI, much better than Firefox in the UI regard, and it's the same rendering engine... doesn't support Firefox plugins though, which is unfortunate, and it's still a bit rough
• IE 6 (Windows only) is generally pretty good, from the DOM standpoint, the closest to Mozilla in terms of quality, and they've implemented a few out-of-spec APIs that are actually really helpful! Others should implement them too, but probably won't for religious reasons
• Safari (Mac only) is very good in the DOM/DHTML/blahblahblah category as well, a very close third to IE's second
• It goes way downhill very quickly from there
• Opera's support for DHTML and Javascript is abysmal at best
• Opera's behavior is generally not what you want
• OmniWeb is nice, but not compelling... though I haven't used it in testing against complex web apps, so I don't know the state of its DOM/DHTML handling
• All browsers are asymptotic to infinity in terms of memory usage over "long" periods of time (days or weeks)

So basically, on the Mac, I find Safari's quirks very minor and livable in comparison to the clumsier UI and un-Mac-like behavior of the Mozilla browsers, and Opera is unusable on any platform (even my phone!). I like OmniWeb, but I don't think that it has what it takes under the hood to be a current standards-based browser (but I'd love to be proved wrong).