waffle

Woah. Part of the Mac OS X loader will, as of Leopard, meddle in PE binaries and try to suck in related DLLs.

The consequences are definitely unforetold, but the mere hint of evidence that a team inside Apple’s doing actual work around this is certainly interesting.

(Title stolen shamelessly from DF and used for effect. May contain nuts and small animals. Beach BBQ Ken sold separately.)

In the middle of July, I proposed a date by which people could have resolution-independent applications out the door. That date was today. There wasn’t any significant adoption of the idea, but I never stopped holding it as a personal goal for myself.

So, how am I personally doing?

• Hex Color Picker is fully resolution independent. I don’t do any custom drawing at all, and the icon I use is usable up to 128 x 128. There’s not really much to do here.

• ThisService is fully resolution independent of my own volition. Everything custom drawn is drawn in code and scales perfectly to any size. The icon is still not a Leopard icon supporting a 512 x 512 version, but that’ll be fixed in the next release.

• Monocle is almost resolution independent. The window resizing code in the Preferences panel doesn’t differentiate between points and pixels and deals with both the window frame and the content view’s frame in the same unit, which is a big no-no. Most images are large which means that they can be scaled down to the right size, but not all. An update will be coming out, and addressing the bugs will be an important part of that update.

• Gmail+Growl… well, Gmail+Growl is old. Oooold. I’m working on its successor which will have paid attention to all of this, but I don’t actually know how Gmail+Growl 2.0 (the current version) fares because I’ve been using the next version for quite a while.

I hoped I’d be able to release updates and reach my personal goal, but things have been hectic and I simply haven’t been able to do that so far. This is pretty academic for now, and there’s no penalty for coming in late if your definition of ‘late’ is today, but having at least thought about it is worth a lot. Apple has said to expect high-resolution displays in 2008, and that’s not too far off now.

Fellow developers: how are your apps doing?

No, the current legitimate unlocked iPhone proposals don’t mesh well with my previous scenario of Apple selling unlocked iPhones directly to customers since they have in fact still chained themselves to a carrier and they are still trying to sell phones with that carrier, and for some odd reason, the carrier would like it if people bought the shackled version and had to sign up with all kinds of long-term plans with them instead of just getting a pure unlocked version.

My scenario wasn’t a “you just wait until the unlocked iPhones inevitably pop up in Europe” scenario, it was a “what if they had never gone with a carrier to begin with” scenario. They have a five year contract with AT&T, so I don’t have high hopes for there being such a thing for a while, unless they have different length contracts with European carriers. Apple already knows that people want an unlocked iPhone.

Writes Jeff Johnson on a totally unrelated matter, but with awesome prescience:

Apple finally released Mac OS X 10.5, code named “Leopard”, followed soon thereafter by Mac OS X 10.5.1, code named “Oops”.

Leopard is a release that’s got it together in most places. However, it’s the biggest Mac OS X upgrade ever, and it was subject to a humiliating delay (or several, depending on how you count or if your last name is Thurrott), which means that it’s been harder than before to coordinate everything to work exactly as planned on the release day.

However, Spotlight is in such a state of disarray that I’m honestly wondering if they thought they could pull off a rewrite of the UI but had to abandon ship and patch things together before shipping it.

• Not only can you only search certain sub-folders of “This Mac”, excluding potentially interesting (and potentially annoying) preference files (update: patently false; check that article again), you can’t actually choose folders to the same extent that you did in Tiger. In Tiger you could click “Other” and bring up a list to which you could persistently add your favorite folders and check the folders to search this time around. In Leopard… it’s either “This Mac” or the folder or volume you had selected or are positioned in. And gaming it is not an option - if you have two or more volumes or folders selected, or if you’re in a location that can’t be searched (the Trash), it falls back to This Mac.

• The results are also abysmal. I’m not sure if anyone liked the Spotlight grouped view from Tiger (it had strange selection retention problems on queries that hadn’t finished or that kept re-running, in my experience) but the list view, or the list portion of the Cover Flow view, is certainly worse than in Tiger. You get three columns (Name, Kind and Last Opened) and no way to change them, making searches for file size, any date but Last Opened or in fact any other piece of metadata a thoroughly useless exercise. In fact, no view options appear whatsoever in any mode, except for the omnipresent option to Always Open that particular search or Smart Folder in that mode. Gee, thanks.

What’s most annoying about this is that Spotlight is fast in Leopard. Spotlight was slow and crash-prone in Tiger, no matter which of my Macs or which hard drive, and no matter how many times I reset the indices and started over. Someone cleaned out the hybrid maple syrup / motor oil gunk out of Spotlight’s kernel pipelines, and now regular use is severely hampered.

Here’s hoping for Mac OS X 10.5.2, “Restored Prowling”.