The often deranged postings of yet another hacker, pretending to be an Astronomer, pretending to be a hacker who has written a book or two for O'Reilly Media.
Earlier this morning I spotted (via Twitter) that Microsoft's World Wide Telescope had finally been released...
After wading through their flash based website to get to the download page I found out that the "Mac version" is a version that runs under Windows in Boot Camp. Which isn't exactly a Mac version at all, a bit of false advertising there I think...
At which point I was really interested to see Roy Williams quoted as saying,
...a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well - Roy Williams
While it is more common in the US, I don't think I know a single British astronomer that owns a Windows box outside of the VO community. In fact someone else here at Exeter said that Roy's quote caused them an "...ironic chuckle". Which is pretty much how WWT has been received. Nobody here can try it because nobody has a Windows machine, we either run Linux or OSX.
Since the release this morning I've seen conflicting reports about WWT. The Register, which admittedly isn't generally acknowledged to be particularly pro-Microsoft, just couldn't get it to work while Stefan Geens over on Ogle Earth liked it a lot. So your milage may vary, but mine won't. It'll stay firmly at zero. I don't own a Windows machine, and I'm unlikely to go through the pain of installing Windows on my Mac to try it out...
This is just a quick warning for people thinking of buying a Dynamode USB to Serial Convertor. This device uses an Ark Micro chipset, rather than the more common Prolific PL-2303. Unlike the PL-2303 chipset, which has OSX drivers, the Ark Micro chipset doesn't. So if you want a USB to Serial convertor to use with your Mac, don't buy this one...
When it isn't released yet? The general opinion is that Apple will open up the iPhone to third-party developers in October by providing a software development kit (SDK) with Leopard. I don't know anyone that isn't expecting this to happen now that the API has been more or less reverse-engineering and the first "professional" third-party applications are seeing the light of day.
Nobody is selling anything yet, but its interesting to see companies like Delicious Monster are willing to release native applications. Sociologically at least, this is a whole different kettle of fish than individuals releasing terminal emulators and other such stuff. Companies, even uber-cool ones are notoriously conservative. They generally take legal advise before doing stuff like this, and they're presumably pretty sure that Apple legal won't be dropping by to say hello in the near future. Which is interesting, no?
Well I'm typing this using the new Safari 3 Public Beta on my ageing 12-inch Powerbook, and I must admit to being moderately unimpressed. It looks like they've finally caught up with Firefox. Okay, so everybody and their dog have been able to rearrange their browser tabs, but being able to drag one out of the browser and make a new window is kind of cool, although not being able to drag another window into your browser to make it a tab definitely isn't.
Inline search in the Safari 3 Public Beta
The new inline search feature is definitely cool, and along with the new snapback feature for returning to my search results after I've navigated navigated away from the original page, look like a good solid user interfaces. It also look like they've been talking to Google as a good deal of the new Blogger interface has suddenly gone "live" with the new browser. I wonder how many more Google applications that were previously just non-functional with Safari (or had limited functionality) just also started working?
For a public beta, the new browser also seems reasonably stable, so I can't complain too much, but what's really new? It's a web browser, I'm no longer impressed by a web browser. Why doesn't do exposé for tabs in the same way as Shiira does? Why doesn't it apply some sort of default style sheet for HTML and XML source code, why do I have to hit View Source? For that matter why does View Source not do syntactic highlighting when it shows you the page source? Every other browser does...
That said the new beta looks good, but I'm still probably going to stick with Safari for the same reason I always have, that it integrates into the system spell checker when entering text.
Apart from the new Safari, Steve talked a lot about the new features upcoming in Leopard. We've seen some of this stuff last year at WWDC'06, but there was some new stuff...
Although I guess someone has been looking at the BumTop interface, because you know what, Stacks look a bit familiar and to be honest, I've never really liked the iTunes interface. I don't have enough screen real estate for it on my 12-inch Powerbook, so the new Finder doesn't really impress me that much. Quick Look is okay, but not an amazing step forward.
I think it's quite telling that Apple stock fell 3% following the keynote. None of the announcements here are particilarly amazing, and when it comes down to it where were all the cool hardware the rumour sites were promising. Where are the new ultra-portables to replace my 12-inch Powerbook ?
I'm not even going to mention the weak excuse for developer support for the iPhone. If it doesn't appear as an icon on the main phone interface, it's a web application, not an phone application. No matter what the integration with the local hardware turns out to be...
Update: Apple has just posted the keynote address on to their website.
Update: I'm not alone thinking that the third party developer option we're being offered isn't exactly great, although I agree that Steve didn't really do a good job of selling what they are offering to the assembled developers.
Update: I should have thought of this (via iPhone Matters). Because it all makes sense, the reason why Apple has ported Safari to Windows is fairly obvious,
...in order for developers to write and test “applications” for the iPhone, they must have access Safari. As of yesterday, that would limit iPhone developers to Mac developers only, since Safari did not exist on Windows. - The Apple Press
Update: For those of you who missed it, "Hello I'm Steve Jobs"...
Update: David Cann has created an iPhone interface mock-up (via TUAW) to try and get a feel for how these web applications will look on the iPhone. I'm still not convinced, if it doesn't show up as an icon on the main interface, will users really think of it as an application, or just another web site?
I've been waiting for this since I heard that Mozy was coming out with a version of their client that'll run under OSX, although I was slightly sceptical about how well something ported from Windows would manage. After all the "look and feel" of OSX is radically different from Windows, but while it isn't Delicious Library, it does look like they've built their Mac client from the ground up and not attempted a straight port. Well done to Berkeley Data Systems, you just figured out a crucial point a lot of companies miss, Mac users like their software to look like it was written for a Mac.
Basically, as Ars Technica says, this is what .Mac backup should have been. In fat you have to ask yourself why Apple, with access to the OS at a level no third party vendor could possible hope to match, and with .Mac integrated directly into the system preferences, didn't do this first?
Update: The bad news? It doesn't work, at least not for me. The Mac Mozy application hangs during configuration as it rummages around on my disk indexing all my Microsoft Powerpoint files. The response from customer support was less than helpful, which was surprising, I guess I've got used to really good customer support from all those small Web 2.0 start-up companies that are really interested in their product and how you interact with it...
After setup it just hangs trying to index things...
Update: Well, it sort of works. Somehow I managed to get it past the hang by mucking around deleting preference files and other stuff you really shouldn't have to do, and managed to do my first backup. Except I don't trust it, after running for a couple of days now its continually mis-reporting the number and size of the files its sending for backup. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence that my files would be there if I needed them. So in summary, looks good, but not quite there yet. Like the customer service, I guess those pesky Web 2.0 start up companies have left me wanting more from a 'beta'.
Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain...
which is an interesting statement to make about a language that was the way to do things only a few years ago. I've never personally liked Java that much, not because I think its a bad language, but because it doesn't fit well with the way I think. After a decade and a half writing Fortran and C code, and a brief couple of years writing Java, I'm at a loss to explain why anyone still writes high level software in a statically typed language. Especially one that forces you into a straight jacket about the way you build objects. I guess that's why I'm a Perl guy, although like a lot of Perl people these days I seem to be writing a lot of Javascript, and Python, and PHP if comes to that...
Java desktop apps succeed only in niches where UI design and usability don't matter: development tools and enterprise software. Programmers expect things to be crude and complicated... and the poor users of enterprise software don't have a choice...
which is another interesting statement about the language, obliquely making the point that Daniel Steinberg made in his recent article,
Developers are looking at Flash and at AJAX as platforms for rich desktop applications. If Java becomes irrelevant... then we will enter a new phase in it's life. There will be plenty of uses for Java for a good long while but we are entering the Fortan phase or the COBOL phase.
Of course it's going to be all that C code we wrote in the 80's and 90's that means we'll be pulled out of retirement in 2038 rather than the Java code we were writing at the turn of the millennium, but I take his point...
...it's possible that Microsoft is out of ideas, and Apple is out of ideas from which Microsoft can borrow.
Like David, I don't hold Dvorak in high esteem as a technical journalist, I think he's out of touch with what's actually going on but sometimes he makes a good point, and this time he might be right.
Dvorak's arguments that Vista will be the last major version of Microsoft's operating system have a certain ring of truth. However perhaps that's possibly because I agree with him, although for different reasons.
Running with Dvorak's arguement, David talks about the main problem facing Apple right now, the very reason for its current success, Steve Jobs. What happens to Apple when Steve either loses interest in computers, if he hasn't already done so, or since no one lives for ever, up and dies on them? Apple doesn't seem to encourage a culture from which an obvious successor for Steve would organically arise, and like many I'm sure that there is some really worried people in Apple's upper management right now, and of course like Microsoft Vista, you have to wonder where Apple should go from here with OSX?
While there is a growing agreement that out "traditional" view of operating systems might be due for a rethink, nobody really agrees what's next. Well you know what I think, Russell Beattie had it right,
If someone's using a PC to demo the next big thing, then it's not the next big thing... - Russell Beattie
The future is in mobile computing, ubiquitous computing and location based services, and if you're building something that even requires a desktop machine to access you're not looking very far ahead. Whatever happens it's going to be a interesting few years, because we're not just going to go on as before, that certainly isn't one of the options...
There has been EFI firmware updates for the; iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and Mac Pro which should fix several Boot Camp, start up, and wake-from-sleep issues.
Apple have also released a Firmware Restoration CD (20.5MB), which can be used to restore the firmware of an Intel-based Macintosh computer, and an update for the Apple X11 framework which enables it to better handle GLX stereo visuals and offscreen rendering to GLX Pbuffers and Pixmaps. Hopefully these firmware updates should alleviate the hardware problems people have been seeing with the new Intel Macs.
Applescript is amazingly useful, but scripting applications using it still requires some basic programming knowledge. Which is probably why Apple introduced Automator with the release of Tiger, which allows you to script your applications simply by dragging and dropping predefined actions into a workflow, no coding required.
As Ogle Earth points out this is perfect for building scripted tours with voice overs, although with the limitation that Automator has no easy way of playing prerecorded sound files, so at least for the moment you have to use a synthesised voice.