waffle

I know how this sounds, but the founder of my political party of choice said it best.

No counter-terrorist measure stopped Anders Behring Breivik from plotting, preparing or perpetuating his attack. Infringements on civil liberties, open society and the freedom to roam at most stop buffoons, if that. Short of mind reading and constant mandatory raids by magically non-corrupt agencies, there will always be the opportunity for people like Breivik to decide to do certain deeds and carry on doing them. Instead of trying to white paint ineptitude by treating the symptoms and blaming them on religion or culture, why not attack the real causes?

As bad as I feel for every affected Norwegian, our sibling people, I’m hoping that something can once again be learned from this: the fall of the transparently populist extremist-right movement across Europe and the US; the realization that, taken with the earlier peace struggles, we’re all just people, or maybe just that there are better ways to fight terrorism than taking your shoes off or feeling people up.

Every-edge window resizing works wonders on Windows and on most Linux window managers I’ve known. It doesn’t on Mac OS X; at least not yet. It works wonders on Windows because there’s a maximize button which puts the window in a maximized state. The state where the window essentially covers most of the screen is just where moving the cursor to the extreme left and the extreme right will not bring up any resizing cursors; you’ve already said “I want this to cover the screen”.

Mac OS X also has full-screen windows, but only as on Wednesday. Every resizable window in every app gets every-edge resizing, but not every app will want every resizable window to go full-screen or has written code to allow for this yet. For this reason, hitting Zoom in some apps (the ones that don’t shrink the window to fit the content) or using Cinch to dock a window to cover the entire screen will get you as close to “Windows maximized” as possible, but also put you in this horrible condition where every-edge resizing is still active, taunting you, itching the moment you hit any of the four edges of the window, not to mention the four corners of the window.

Transitions are painful. Sometimes it takes effecting this change to see why there were doubts to begin with; Windows’ model is sufficiently different from Mac OS X that this never happens.

Also, who invented the application that would completely needlessly position its main window at an offset of one or two pixels below the menu bar and to the left of the screen’s edge? I know of people who like this and it comes down to personal taste, but I’d like for them to at least know that they’re being wrong and unreasonable. Who can get upset over torn paper when there are windows deliberately being positioned off of the “infinite wall”? Deliberately making the left edge of the screen a place to click to activate not the window you thought you were aiming at but some window a few layers down, or the Finder (via the Desktop)? Fitts would indeed get fits.

Yesterday, a workshop floor build of ThisService produced the first service with more intimate interplay with Snow Leopard’s service architecture. A few hours later, John Gruber, ThisService’s instigator, received a copy of ThisService 3.0 beta 1.

With the smallest possible margin, ThisService produced a Snow Leopard ready service before Snow Leopard went out of style. I know I could have, should have done this a long time ago. It’s a long story; one that involves trying to work out what else to do with ThisService besides adding Snow Leopard service support. It is the paradox of choice in action. We apologize for the inconvenience.

What’s already done in ThisService 3.0?

• Support for service icons. Snow Leopard and Lion show icons next to the services in the Services menu. Even beyond that, they appear on the service bundle you have to install.
• Support for “required context”. This is the ability to say that this service should only show up if the input has a specific writing system, a specific dominant language, contains a specific type of detected data (email, URL, address, date and/or file path) and/or has a maximum number of words, or that the service should only be available from a particular application. The services architecture supports a number of combinations of these rules, but at least initially, 3.0 will only support one combination. The backend code is ready to produce combinations, but the UI gets very involved.
• Creating pre-enabled services. Snow Leopard only pre-enables services if you write out the “required context” information (even if you don’t require anything) and ThisService now does this.
• More information available to the service script about the environment in which it runs.
• The service skeleton (ThisService’s glue that in addition to the service script makes up the service) is now a lot smarter about pumping data when you’re feeding it large data sets. The previous approach was, to put it mildly, naïve. Naïve in a way that seemed to work for the vast majority of cases, but still not really correct.

What’s left to do?

• Hooking most of the application back up. I’ve been performing some spring cleaning.
• Possibly upgrading previous services to Snow Leopard services by providing a new mode where you pick a ThisService service and supply additional data.
• Updating the documentation.
• Releasing ThisService 3.0 as open source under the BSD license.

A few things will be going away. I’m removing the shortcut box, since you can change the shortcut (and keep changing it) inside the Keyboard system preference panel and since (due to that) I consider it a bad practice to distribute a service with a shortcut already set.

I am also removing support for Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger. I am estimating that fewer than 20 regular ThisService users are afflicted by this change. By taking the step up to Leopard as a minimum I’ve been able to take advantage of many small improvements to make the application better and easier to maintain. There’s also fewer and fewer dividends for any pre-Snow Leopard version.

If you want to beta test ThisService 3.0, contact me at thisservice, commercial at symbol, wafflesoftware dot net.

ThisService 3.0 is dedicated to Aaron Swartz. Scraping is not a crime.

TechRadar reports on Mini DisplayPort to HDMI-cables being “unauthorized” cables that shouldn’t be on sale:

“The HDMI specification defines an HDMI cable as having only HDMI connectors on the ends. Anything else is not a licensed use of the specification and therefore, not allowed.” [..] The news will be a massive blow to the many companies who are making these cables, but the HDMI does point out that those cables with a DisplayPort socket on one side and an HDMI female receptacle on the other (essentially a dongle) are okay. This is because a licensed HDMI lead can slot into them.