waffle

What do you think? Worth the extra 90 grams?

(With minor apologies to Erik.)

They had a crusty old iBook 14″, the second-to-last model ever released. They had bought a new iMac and almost reported the delivery man to his superiors when he just brought one box — non-laptops come in several boxes, don’t they? They called me to help set it up.

We bought a FireWire cable, dealt with registration, unpacked the few pieces in the package and marvelled at the thin keyboard. The migration took around 40 minutes. Afterwards, everything was lovingly retained, including desktop pictures, AirPort settings and application preferences. The migrated Entourage 2004 thoroughly outdone its older copy even when emulated in Rosetta, although this may be attributed to the general sogginess of the iBook.

Safari was snappy. Really, really snappy — snappier than IE on Windows on their work PC. Front Row and that odd remote was convincingly magical and wonderful. The whole machine worked like it didn’t need the extra RAM they had been meaning to get for it. I told them about Time Machine and about plugging in a hard drive and clicking a button, and about automatic backups for the rest of the machine’s life, and their eyes lit up. “We’re getting one of those,” they said.

Macs have their faults and omissions, but it’s still hard not to see how this sort of computer upgrade experience could be compelling. This may be one of the rarely-realized “everything clicked” scenarios, but it’s the only one I’ve heard of from personal experience, and it’s not for a lack of trying.

I’ve written an iPhone SDK scorecard which I hope to fill in at the closest possible opportunity. What I haven’t done is talk about what I think is coming. So in the analysis vein, without dithering left and right, here is a series of bold statements about the iPhone SDK, predictions that I really do think will be happening; no wiggle-room whatsoever. If I’m proved wrong at anything here, you may hold it against me forever.

• The iPhone SDK will be vastly more open in terms of who gets to use it and how you can use what it produces than the iPod game SDK.
• The iPhone SDK will let you develop native applications in Objective-C.
• The iPhone SDK will be tiered, so that Apple’s or close third-party applications can work on a deeper level than your applications.
• The iPhone SDK will let you write applications that can ultimately qualify as freeware.
• The iPhone SDK will let you redistribute your source code so that other people can compile and run it. (Open source.)
• The iPhone SDK will let you plug in your iPhone and try out your application live with remote hooks for debugging at your computer.
• The iPhone SDK will not, Cocoa bridges be damned, let you write applications in any currently existing implementation of Ruby or Python since they use up too much memory.

Something that got lost in the shuffle when Monocle 1.5 was introduced was its plugin API to provide suggestions and results. Monocle is easily bastardized to do your evil bidding even when it’s not necessarily related to launching web searches, and I thought I’d demonstrate this.

In about two hours tonight, I wrote a small plugin called Texposé. When you install it, it will install a new results provider that you can enable. Texposé lets you search the open on-screen windows in any application by name. When you hit enter to “follow the result”, you will immediately jump to the window.

The windows are grouped by applications; while the applications don’t show up in any particular order, the windows appear in their “z-order” and so the topmost window is also on the top of the list. This lets you distinguish between two windows with the same name in the same app. Right now, Texposé also tries to leave out less important windows, which filters out palettes but also some useful windows that happen to be “panels”.

Install Texposé by putting it into [home] → Library → Application Support → Monocle and restarting Monocle. Also make sure to go to System Preferences → Universal Access (the white person on the blue circle) and check Enable access for assistive devices, the topmost checkbox of the bottom two; otherwise Monocle can’t actually switch to the window for you.

Texposé requires Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard). Full source code available on request - use the contact link on Monocle’s web site.