iNik A pathetic waste of high technology...

This morning, I posted an article that was highly critical of Matthew Drayton’s management of the Interarchy file transfer application since he, as Nolobe, purchased it from the original developer. Specifically, I was frustrated with the lack of communication and shutting of communication channels between the big 9.0 release and the much-needed 9.01 bug fix which just came out.

Only a few hours after I posted this article, Matthew contacted me to apologize for the release and also to explain the circumstances which made a timely release of 9.01 impossible. As my criticism was both public and unjustified, I’ll apologize here, publicly, for this criticism. I have also unpublished that article.

However, beyond the specific criticism, it does demonstrate the importance of maintaining open communication with your customers. While most customers respond favorably to open communication, I think it’s especially important for small and independent companies, including independent software developers. This is probably even more important for independent developers who sell exclusively online, since their customers are much more likely to be part of the blogging/forum posting/twittering crowd.

People who purchase from independent developers act like grass roots supporters of a political campaign. Whether or not it’s justified, they feel that they are on a first-name basis with their favorite software’s developer, and they tend to especially watch new products from the same company.

This relationship is based on trust and communication. Those developers who actively maintain blogs, participate in forums, or who simply email quickly and responsively to requests can generate very passionate users. (Even if their software isn’t terribly high quality!)

Of course, those supporting customers come to count on this open communication. If it breaks down, it can leave customers feeling abandoned, and make them lose faith in the developer and their software. It can cause them to cease upgrading or even to defect to other programs. And, of course, there’s the beatings that an unresponsive developer can face on forums such as VersionTracker and MacUpdate.

What some developers overlook (and, again, I am not picking on Matthew here) is that this intimacy is a two way street. Just as the open communication helps users learn to use their software better, it is also a fantastic tool for priming the market for new updates and new products. And, perhaps even more importantly, it creates opportunities for the developer to get their users’ aid when they need it. Whether that’s a request for patience on an overdue update, advice on where to move web hosting to, or to gather a group of volunteer beta testers or even contributors. (documentation wiki, anyone?)

When Nolobe went “dark,” and stopped posting to blogs and pulled its forums, I lost confidence in the company and the software. I hadn’t upgraded to Interarchy 9 and was still using 8 until a less buggy version was available. Even though the developer was doing his utmost to get that 9.01 update out the door, it took a few months.

In the grand scheme of things, that isn’t much.

On the other hand, I’ve been using Interarchy (well, Anarchie and then Interarchy) for more than ten years. Seeing it change owners and then become unreliable on the next update is something else entirely.

Should Matthew have posted, at a minimum, a blog entry saying “It’ll come out later, please be patient?” It couldn’t have hurt. When a favorite restaurant is closed, you at least expect a sign saying when they’ll be open again — whether that’s tomorrow morning and you just caught them outside of business hours, or if it’s in a few weeks while they renovate.

Sometimes a person doesn’t even have the time or energy to even do that much. But for the users, the faithful supporters of a business, that note can mean everything.

Want proof? I just purchased the Interarchy 9 upgrade I’d been holding off on.

I didn’t buy it by way of apology for my undue critique. I bought it for two reasons: It fixed the bugs that made me hold off on the upgrade in the first place; and Matthew’s prompt and charitable email, even after my harsh criticism of Matthew himself — not just his software or his company. This email restored my faith in Matthew and Nolobe as stewards of one my mainstay programs. After all, what could be more personal and intimate than that personal email?

MacFUSE with SSHFS gives you Finder-level access to your SSH and SFTP servers. It’s been out for a while and is free and open source. Now it’s being challenged by ExpanDrive, which does much the same thing, but costs $29 (at a special introductory price, no less).

So which one is better?

I’ve been using MacFUSE ever since it first came on the scene in order to access my DreamHost web server. For most tasks, I’d much rather copy a file within the Finder than open a custom client program, log into a server, and deal with upload/download target directories, external editors, etc. So MacFUSE’s SSHfs module has been an absolute dream for me.

Of course, it’s also a bit frustrating. It seems like Interarchy’s always just a bit faster at browsing my SFTP server. Copying files seems to send them back home and out to the server again, so a file duplication in the same filesystem that should take a few minutes takes ten or more! And then there’s the times that it just sort of craps out on me for some reason. Those times are rare, but they happen.

So when Daring Fireball tipped me off to Magnetk’s ExpanDrive utility, I decided to give it a try and run it through it’s paces.

The ExpanDrive developers comment that it’s based on MacFUSE, but has been variously improved with better caching and other “secret sauce.” It also handles reconnects after your computer goes to sleep, and claims to deal gracefully with poor network connections..

I gave it some straightforward tests. I opened and edited files; copied large and small files back and forth (and timed the copies); and then did my best to break things by opening disk images on the mounted SFTP drive, expanding and compressing zip files, and duplicating large files.

The results? They’re the same. Really. The same.

I got some slightly different performance on copying small files from the ExpanDrive rather than through MacFUSE if I’d already downloaded them once. This must be the caching they’ve referred to. But the difference was negligible, since it only applied to smaller files.

Both were horrid at duplicating files, and both crashed the Finder once. (It came right back with the remote SFTP drives mounted in both cases)

Now ExpanDrive is very easy to install and use, which definitely scores some points with me. But MacFUSE is no longer a horrid geeky affair to get SSHFS up and running — just a regular package installer and then an SSHFS application that loads your drive with a double-click. You can also use a utility like MacFusion to give you a nice GUI to mount drives. A bit more complex, maybe, but not bad. (MacFusion also re-mounts filesystems after your computer wakes up)

Based on my tests, I’m sticking with MacFUSE and SSHFS. Mostly I just need it as an alternative to an FTP client, and it works fantastically for that. If I were to keep the remote disk up and running all the time (a la my iDisk), then I might be more interested in ExpanDrive’s incremental improvements over the basic MacFUSE setup. (Although I could use JungleDisk — also based on MacFUSE, but using AmazonS3 instead of SFTP — to do the same thing and enjoy the cheapest online storage out there as well as the peace of mind of having all my remote files encrypted)

Regardless, it’s exciting to see all the interesting projects that have come out of the FUSE and MacFUSE projects. There’s just nothing quite like browsing your web server’s image directories using the CoverFlow view and with QuickLook readily available.

OmniWeb 5 has an excellent ad blocking mechanism. What it doesn’t have is the ability to easily subscribe to or import some of the blacklists out on the internet, such as those used by the Adblock Plus Firefox add-on.

In order to make up for this deficit (at least partially), I downloaded the latest EasyList filter list and modified it so that it uses proper, OmniWeb-compatible, regular expressions.

The one downside with this list is that there is no way to automatically import the blacklist and whitelist files into OmniWeb. Instead, you have to edit OmniWeb’s preferences file directly to add the entries. Instructions on how to do this are included with the rest of the download.

I have no plans to continue updating this list. It’s current as of March 11, 2008. Consider it a good start for your ad filtering and update it manually as needed. I’ve included instructions on how to make your own custom file if you’re so inclined.

Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died on March 4th. I cannot begin to estimate how many hours (and dollars!) I’ve spent playing, studying up on, imagining, and otherwise enjoying his games and those that came after.

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s Company-Wide Memo Regarding the Microsoft Takeover Bid

Hilarious!

Google Docs now supports forms that link directly to spreadsheets. The potential uses of this are limitless. Remote data entry, surveys, collaborative lists…

From the Official Google Docs Blog

If you have a Mac, you have friends and family who assume you’re a designer. “Please make me a business card!” they plead, “Can you set up a brochure for me?”

You’re a nice person, though, so you break out AppleWorks and start putting stuff together. Hey, even someone with my level of design skills can put up some boxes and text and a picture. The problem comes when you have to pick what color to make everything.

Let’s see… Red, Blue, and Green. Those are nice colors. But why does it look like crap?

Enter Mondrianum, or color picking for farm animals and the mentally disabled. Mondrianum is a wicked cool plug-in for MacOS X’s color picker that lets you browser color sets on Adobe’s Kuler site. (Kuler, if you haven’t heard of it, is a site where design nerds can create and share color palettes with one another.)

Thanks to Kuler, a lot of folks with WAY better design sense than you have, created a wealth of cool color palettes. Pick a palette, pick your colors, and go to town!

Now THAT’S a nice brochure!

When I upgraded to a MacBook, I didn’t bother installed Adobe CS2. It’s a PPC app, it takes forever to launch, and I really don’t use it all that much, although I do enjoy using it since I know it so well.

Since then, I’ve been looking for alternatives to Adobe’s apps that work well, and are reasonably priced. Unfortunately, there’s nothing out there that matches the power and usefulness of Adobe’s suite. (Quark vs. InDesign notwithstanding) But there are some good applications if your requirements don’t precisely match Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.

Also, if you don’t want to deal with the X11 stuff, there’s been a total explosion of new graphics programs for the Mac which are not as broadly feature-filled as Photoshop or Illustrator, but in many ways give Adobe a run for its money.

Image Editors

Nothing matches Photoshop’s abilities for color correction, but there’s many apps that come close. The biggest weakness is that many of these programs use CoreImage filters, which are simply not that good for color adjustments and touch-ups. (There’s no equivalents to Levels or Curves).

The Gimp is a popular open-source Photoshop equivalent. Personally, I prefer GimpShop, which is about the same as The Gimp, but it’s been modified to act more like Photoshop. It runs in the X11 environment, so you won’t be fooled into thinking it’s a native Mac application. (Although it has a MacOS X application launcher so that you can associate file types with it, drag and drop, etc.) It does most of what Photoshop can do, and has pretty good color correction tools. Whether you use one of these other apps or not, I recommend keeping The Gimp around purely for the color adjustment tools, which are unmatched by other apps.

Pixelmator is about as close to Photoshop as you’ll get in a native Mac program without buying Photoshop. Photoshop-like interface with more style, I guess. Opens and saves in pretty darn near every format, thanks to the imagemagick libraries.

Acorn is an awesome tool for “normal” graphics tasks, and has a totally new and intuitive, simple, interface. It does some impressive higher-end effects and adjustments using Core Image filters (the same basis for all these other apps’ filters, so they’re about the same if you’re rasterbating).

DrawIt is hard to explain, but it’s a drawing and painting program that’s very interestingly and intuitively designed. Think of it as iAdobeCreativeSuite or something. While its bitmap abilities are limited, they’re aided by the addition of CoreImage filters, so you can actually get by with most simple adjustments. Since it’s greatest strength is illustration, I’ll leave it be for now.

Painter X, from Corel, which is a very powerful image editor and natural-media painting program which is pretty expensive but very, very, good. Of course, if you’re buying Painter, you can probably afford Photoshop.

ArtRage is a natural-media painting program, a la Painter (but much cheaper), which is totally designed for graphics tablets. It’s fullscreen with a simple and hide-able palette setup that makes it a total dream for just sketching stuff out. It also has a very cool rulers setup where you can create a virtual physical ruler to ensure that you draw a straight line when that’s important to you. It’s also available in a “Starter Edition,” which is free but has fewer tools and no layers. If you have a tablet, there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t have the starter edition on your Mac.

Illustration

I’m a fan of vector drawing apps, and there’s some incredibly good ones on the Mac, outside of Adobe’s stranglehold. As a long-time fan of Freehand 3.1, I’m happy to report that there’s tons of apps which can equal, if not exceed, that storied program.

Lineform from Freeverse is a very intuitive and straightforward vector program. It has wonderful features for free drawing, with artistic strokes and all kinds of other good stuff.

Intaglio is a powerful but somewhat confusingly designed drawing program. It supports precision drawing and has lots of interesting tools, but it is sometimes frustrating due to some odd interface design.

DrawIt, which I mentioned above, handles vector as well as raster art, and really is at its best in that environment. It has a very simple and intuitive pen tool, and makes it simple to combine raster and vector art as well as text. Where it falls short is in precision: It has no rulers and you can only specify document sizes in pixels. This is a real shame, as the program feels like a welcome resurrection of SuperPaint. I can only assume that this is an intentional design decision, as the program is at a fairly mature version 3.

Inkscape is to Illustrator what The Gimp and GimpShop are to Photoshop. It’s a solid, open source vector drawing program. Like Gimpshop, it runs under X11, and for that reason I really can’t recommend it when there are many native alternatives that are easier to use and, in their own way, more powerful.

Page Layout

I haven’t tried many page layout applications, so I’ll keep this to a quick summary. All are variously underpowered compared to InDesign, but all of them could get the job done. MacKiev makes The Print Shop , Apple’s Pages (part of iWork) , Swift Publisher and Scribus (which is pretty capable except that it’s built in ugh Java).

My personal recommendation? DrawIt is dead simple to use, and also does vector, so if you don’t need precision drawing, I recommend it highly. If you do a lot of bitmap “production” work (resizing, saving in different formats, etc.), Acorn is definitely worth a look. Pixelmator’s pretty, but it suffers from being a Photoshop clone that’s simply not as good. If you want the power of Photoshop, start up X11 and run Gimpshop. Then for pure illustration, you have ArtRage and Lineform, both of which will aid any artist with a pen tablet.

Really, for $150 or so, you can get the basic capabilities of Adobe’s suite and really have some advantages in ease-of-use and some very nifty innovative capabilities. It’s worth checking all these apps out if you have the time and see what you like most. I still need to look more into page layout, so watch this space for updates!

Full disclosure: I hate Dashboard. I have found very few widgets that do anything useful for me, and having them invisibly off in some weird dashboardy land bugs me, too. It pretty much limits me to widgets that I use infrequently enough that I don’t want them in front of me.

However, I just found a good one. ProdMe is a widget that beeps at you. It can be hourly chimes (a la MacOS 9), an egg timer, or an alarm clock. It can also notify you via Growl.

There’s lots of times that you need a timely reminder. In my case, it’s usually to check on a database restore or an exceptionally long software install/update. I just go to Dashboard, tell ProdMe to bug me in 30 minutes, and in 30 minutes I get a noise and a Growl notification reminding me to check on the server in question.

Very handy for those one-off reminders that you’d rather not burden iCal with. As for it being off in Dashboard-land, well, who cares? It’s a set-and-forget kind of thing, so it belongs there out of my sight.

I often find myself wanting to make my Mac do something even when I’m not there. It could be something as simple as “reboot” or something more complex, like, “Add this task to OmniFocus”. Unfortunately, unless my Mac is up and running and accepting remote connections, there’s no way I can do this.

Or is there?

One obvious answer is to set up mail rules that shoot off AppleScripts. When an appropriately formatted messages comes in from the right sender(s), the script runs, and you’re all set to go. This approach has the advantage of being either close to real time (if Mail’s up and running, it works) or asynchronous if Mail’s off — the actions will fire off when you next check email, if your computer happens to be off.

Another option is to monitor various internet feeds to create similar results. I’ve written about Proxi before, and it remains one of my favorite tools for automating my Mac. One thing it can do is monitor network resources, such as RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Mail, Skype, iChat, etc. This, it turns out, is the key to handling this need for remote automation.

By monitoring an RSS feed, you can set it up to check Gmail (which publishes an ATOM feed of your mail), a blog, or anything else, and have it fire off a script with some or all of the values passed by the feed. One very cool use of this ability is to set up script-firing Gmail rules by just having Proxi parse the ATOM feed and then activate scripts when certain conditions are met. This gives you the best of both worlds: Gmail’s powerful web-based interface, and the integrated goodness of Apple’s Mail program.

Another great tool is Twitter. Twitter’s main purpose is to share little snippets about what you’re up to with the rest of the world. But Twitter can also be used as simply an online notepad. It integrates with both SMS and IM clients, so it’s easy to contact, and you can even use a service like Jott with it, so you can phone in a “tweet” to your Twitter account.

Proxi has a Twitter monitor, so if you set up an appropriate Twitter account, you can have Proxi take action on incoming tweets, just like it can with GMail’s RSS feed.

Lastly, Proxi can monitor iChat and Skype and fire off scripts based on behavior in those apps. (iChat also has some of these capabilities built in if you’ve upgraded to Leopard) This can be an excellent way to have instant access to your computer from a remote machine.

What have I done with this? Well, I set up a Twitter account that feeds directly into OmniFocus so that I can capture a new task anywhere (via the web, SMS, IM, or the phone — thanks to Jott) and rest assured that when I next turn on my Mac, Proxi will pick them up and dump them into my electronic inbox.

When you’re zoomed out to the “all spaces” view, you can drag and drop windows from one space to another to rearrange things. Here’s some keyboard shortcuts to improve upon this feature:

If you hold down the “Command” key while dragging a window, you will move every window of that application within the current space at the same time. (e.g. Every Safari window in the current space will move together, but Safari windows in other spaces with not)

If you do so while holding down the “Shift” key, the window you drag will move to the same location on the screen within the new space. (Especially handy for full-screen windows)

The two keyboard shortcuts can be combined to move all windows of an application to the same location in a new space.

You can also scroll through spaces using your scroll wheel or your two-finger-trackpad-skills while in the all spaces view.

As with all the zoomy eye-candy features of MacOS X, if you hold the shift key down while switching spaces or viewing all spaces, it will do so in slow motion. Oooh!

My iMovie ‘08 Library Compressor just got mentioned by Dan Frakes in MacWorld’s “Mac Gems” column. Very cool. I’m glad it’s been such a popular script. I make all these things for myself, but it’s awesome that so many other folks find them useful.

This is a simple program to reduce the size of your iMovie 08 library.

I love iMovie ‘08. I know, I know, it has less whizzy features than iMovie ‘06 does, but darn it, it’s so darn fast and easy to build videos. I can create a whole hour-long movie in about ten minutes! (Not a very good one, of course — but none of my movies are very good.)

Part of why it’s fast is that it keeps all my clips on hand, ready and willing to be part of my latest (crappy) movie. Unfortunately, all those barely-compressed DV clips take up A LOT of space. (About 10 GB/hour of video!) This application will compress all the DV files in your iMovie library to save huge amounts of disk space! Using Apple’s H.264 compression technology, you can shave 70% off your library space with minimal loss of quality.

UPDATE: v1.2 works with SetFile installed in /usr/bin as well as in the default /Developer/Tools directory.

In Leopard, iDisk syncing creates a sparse disk image for the sync instead of a standard read/write image. This has the huge advantage that your iDisk sync file doesn’t have to be 10 GB in size, but is instead only as large as it needs to be in order to hold all the files on your iDisk. Very nice.

Having faster and more powerful saved searches is great, but I wish they worked a little more consistently.

In the Finder, they show up in the sidebar. That’s great, they’re easy to find and access. However, they’re difficult to browse because they only show up in list or icon view. No column/browser view (my preferred way to quickly navigate folders).