waffle

I’ve bought SanDisk flash memory to the exclusion of other vendors up until now, but I’m stopping that now. Apparently, just because my past two MP3 players haven’t come from SanDisk, I’m a sheep.

SanDisk… fine! Point out the flaws of your competitors - or competitor, since apparently Creative, iRiver, JoS and a bunch of others don’t exist anymore. That there’s only one online DRM-ed music store to buy from. That there’s “only” one color of earbuds (let’s forget about the thousands of industry standard headphones out there). Those are the only legitimate points I could find on the whole site. But for fuck’s sake, tell me more about your actual product. Tell me what it does that’s different from other players and how that’s better.

Have I told you how much I hate faked grassroots movements? Oh my god, you can use a stencil font! Hardcore! This is so genuine! From the streets! At least with Apple’s, Creative’s and iRiver’s advertising, they actually advertise and tell you about their product. If you need someone else to tell you to think for yourself, what does that say about you?

SanDisk: your customers aren’t bozos. They realize that if your product was worth buying in droves, it would be bought in droves - that if you were the leading vendor, you’d have no problems with an “iTatorship”. This isn’t even marketing - it’s just shooting yourself in the foot in a painfully obvious way.

(The obvious “Get a Mac” parallel: those ads are also filled with half-truths and dated notions - I haven’t seen a PC truly hang for about three years - but at least they’re pushing their own product without the guise of a fake underground movement, and at least they’re not insulting the users of their competitor’s products personally.)

My local PC magazine writes sensible things about Windows running on Macs, notes how performance now is comparable and (mostly accurately) reviews a MacBook Pro with the fair score 8 out of 10. I’d link, but it’s in swedish.

The gap is closing. Give peace a chance.

Ironcoder is a most excellent idea at its core. The idea is this: we’ve all seen the extraordinarily clever and cool hacks people create at those conferences. It’s a great way for programmers to relax, unwind and work on something completely a) different and b) pointless.

So while Ironcoder has a great idea, it has so far been unable to live up to the potential. Well, what’s wrong then? Too many, and the wrong, constraints.

Ironcoder is a contest for glory and not money. The limits and gradual unveiling of an API and a theme are good ideas in theory, but not in practice. The choices this far have been a bit out of left field: Ironcoder 0 used the Accessibility API + Mardi Gras, and Ironcoder 1 (which just finished) used iTunes visualization + Emily Dickinson. I’m not generally opposed to choices out of left field, but in case 0 it generated a line of entries that felt very forced, and in case 1, no one besides Gus Mueller even submitted an entry (my guess is that five or so others tried, but gave up because of the untenable scenario). Note that conference contests have genres - you generally can cook up whatever you like and submit it in an anything goes pile, or focus on one area (which is still miles broader) if you know exactly what you want to do.

The part that really wrecks it, though, is the 24 hours limit. On a conference, you really do have next to 24 hours at your disposal. Your hack, if you want it to, has your undivided attention, and for 10 hours if you want it to. Even though Ironcoder is held on weekends, I doubt you’ll get above 5 hours of time to do it in.

Again. Constraints are awesome. They help you work better and faster and oftentimes makes the results that much better. But the wrong constraints, and you’re out the window. If the current trend continues, Ironcoder 2’s requirements will read the programming equivalent of “I want a corporate-looking, professional web site. You have five minutes, the colors lime and pink, the fonts Comic Sans and Wingdings, and omnipresent heavy metal umlauts.”

I, as well as anyone, know that Ironcoder draws inspiration from Iron Chef as well, which mandates more than the conferences do. However, I believe that as it stands, the constraints are wrecking the contest completely. Something I believe to be essential in a revised rules set will be for the judge to make a first non-competing entry on his (or her) own, to prove that the constraints work, and that there’s leeway for ideas. Five minutes after the announcement of the subject, I guessed my way to the winning entry, and that simply shouldn’t be the case. This could be so much more awesome if the concept was fine-tuned a bit, and I believe it’s in capable hands.

A final note: this entry means no offense to Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch (the judge and consequent “constraints master” of the 0th, inaugural contest), Lucas Eckels (ditto for 1st contest on account of winning 0th contest) or Gus Mueller (ditto for 2nd, 1st contest) or any other contestant or participants. Just writing my thoughts, as always.

Recently, I vowed to document the things I hate about Apple’s products. However, because I find it hard to, off-hand, list some of the reasons why I use a Mac in the first place, I will also vow to, here, keep a list of things I love about it.

I believe a big reason why the “Cult of Mac” bullshit is allowed to continue is because no sensible compilation of its upsides exist. Thus, half-assed “journalists” decide that the upsides really don’t exist, and that anyone who claims to love said upsides (or even worse, actually deny the greatness of alternatives) is an irrational cult member. (How “rational” of a conclusion, by the way.)

Thus:

• Proxy icons. They’re a feature of OS X and go way back. Almost everywhere you see some kind of pointer to a document (such as in every document’s title bar, where it’s an icon), you can drag it off to somewhere else to copy, move or create a reference/alias to the file. By holding Command (a modifier key like Control and Alt) and clicking the icon in the document’s title bar specifically, you get a menu showing where on the hard drive (or DVD, network, etc) it is, and you can pick any of the underlying folders or volumes to open a window right there. This is something I continually miss when working in Windows, especially when juggling lots of similarly-named documents.

• Extremely fast PDF-rendering. It’s almost an axiom that clicking a PDF in a browser is the most painful thing you can do. Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat has to load up, which takes centuries, even though recent versions have brought it down to mere ages, and removing plugins can help reduce the wait. Mac OS X has built-in lightning-fast PDF rendering, and the default tool for viewing images and PDFs, Preview, is a very competent PDF reader with very fast searching even on slow hardware.

• The Dock. The Dock is a thing that hangs out on the bottom or one of the sides of your screen and shows a bunch of programs. The programs being shown are the ones running that have windows (some run in the background altogether) and the ones you have dragged in by hand. This has the advantage that you can drag down a bunch of programs you use commonly and start them in a second. Technically, the Dock has been assaulted for trying to do too many things at once and having been forced to compromise, but in actual usage, it scales better for me than programs pinned to the Start menu in Windows XP.

  There’s a few other pros with the Dock - because you have an icon for every open program, the program can affix a sort of status icon - a “badge” - to say that something has happened. The bundled email client, Mail, uses a badge for the number of unread emails in your Inbox; Transmit (an FTP client) shows a small arrow describing that an upload/download is in progress; Adium (an excellent IM client) shows the names of people from whom you have unread IMs from, and so on. If it’s urgent, the icon can bounce a few times or repeatedly, and whether you like this or not is a matter of personal taste. I find myself liking it most of the time, but it can be annoying when it shows up for the wrong reasons.

• Dashboard. Dashboard is a layer of widgets - small HTML-based programs - that swoops to the front with the press of a key. There’s a plethora of widgets that do useful functions, and I personally found it easy to stitch together a few for my own use. The concept of widgets isn’t new, and neither are small HTML programs, but in active use I’ve found more pleasure and use from Dashboard than any other solution.

• High-quality system utilities. Mac OS X already comes with an Address Book that’s actually competent, and that you can actually use as your primary “little black book” kind of program. A solution to sync this with mobile phones and some PDAs - iSync - also ships for free, works and is continually updated. Furthermore, the system-level Address Book is integrated into both Mail and most other programs that can make use of it.

  Good Bluetooth and wireless networking (”AirPort”) support is also bundled, as well as a competent graphing calculator called Grapher. When you double click a font, you actually get a button to install the font and won’t have to drag it to C:\windows\fonts. Genius!

• Halfway decent photo editing abilities. iPhoto is a program that comes in a package called “iLife”, bundled with a new Mac. iPhoto does portend that you give up exact folder arrangements of your photos, but in my opinion delivers more than enough upsides to make up for it. Photos can be shared across the network without any setup by checking a checkbox. Keywords, ‘albums’, folders and filtering makes organization easy. Real-time photo correctional facilities far beyond the ken of Microsoft Photo Editor exist, including a “straighten” tool with a live grid and tilt-and-zoom, and the ability to hold down a key to show the original, uncorrected photo for comparison. Most corrections are also available in the previously mentioned Preview system tool, and another system tool called Image Capture can take care of transferring photos from a digital camera or scanner, so these who are not fans of iPhoto can keep working the way they’re used to.