The following linked articles deal with WebDAV support under earlier versions of OS X, but the basic ideas should still be useful for enabling WebDAV on current versions as well. When iCal is released, WebDAV will allow for syncing of calendars without a .Mac account. I was expecting WebDAV to be something much more complicated, I’m surprised it’s basically just an Apache extension.
WebDAV stands for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol. I know I was wondering…
What a day. Bad start: Posted to an utterly crappy Metafilter thread on the middle east early today, but I was rushed and disgusted, so I didn’t include any links to back up my comment. Only two personal attacks this time. I understand why people don’t use their real names online, it’s one thing to have a pseudonym insulted, another thing entirely to have your real name used. I didn’t think what I said was that inflammatory or exaggerated, but I guess I’ve just read too many disturbing things. I did go looking for supporting links, but reading the Saudi Arabian and Syrian national papers tends to send my mood into the toilet, especially when searching for articles containing words like “jew” or “american”.
Lila had four shots this morning, which is just no fun to watch and left her feeling lousy all day. Several bags of frozen milk smelled bad so I was scrambling to defrost more while Lila was screaming from some unknown combination of hunger and residual effects of the inoculations. On top of all that, our building’s masonry is being repaired, which means there are men outside the window (on the 9th floor) with jackhammers. That hammering resonates all the way through our apartment, loud enough that I have to shout to be heard over it. Phone calls were overlapping, and I never managed to find time to eat anything. My nerves were completely frayed before noon and my first set of clothes had already been thrown up upon.
Thankfully two glasses of wine with dinner smoothed over all of that.
I have a perverse talent for pushing technology until it breaks. Currently Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 have both stopped acknowledging the space-bar, shift-key and option-key constraints. Working with these applications without those tools is like trying to tie your shoes in ski mittens. Other users are having this problem too, but Adobe’s forums are filled with apologists and sycophants. Anyone who questions their design decisions or reports an issue tends to be castigated and shouted down, in some cases even by one particularly loathsome Adobe employee. Here are links to two threads about the problems I’m having, though neither offers a solution (require registration):
My current solution workaround? Photoshop 6 in Classic. Ugh.
I’ve been using Photoshop since version 2.0, and I even have a copy of 1.7.3 on floppy (the whole thing fit on one single floppy disk) I’m not using it much at all anymore, because with each version it gets a little more frustrating and less and less fun. Adobe needs competition.
This is one of the things which worries me about OS X; legacy applications. After researching my current problem and writing this out, I started to want to install Photoshop 4 again. Of all the versions I’ve used, I think that was the closest to perfect. It was before the nightmare of color profiles, and had a clean, fast and logical workflow which seemed to be a perfect extension of the ideas in Photoshop 3. But back to OS X. When we finally lose Classic, which seems like it will happen in the near future, our options are cut off. Photoshop 4 and thousands of other programs won’t be options anymore, even though their still a completely viable applications. Hopefully the same spirit which keeps dragging old technology forward will keep things running into the future.
I was planning on slamming Adobe’s nearly unusable although visually pleasing web site some other time, but it just started to flow. Due to a lousy information architecture, finding information on their site takes forever. Just getting into their forums to browse was a convoluted mess of clicks and pages. One page said I could browse without logging in, but then connected me to the login page. Repeatedly. But the site’s problems don’t end with the unreadable content it displays. The pages themselves are a non-standard mess. They’re still not using DOCTYPE declarations. Their HTML is a disaster. Their CSS is a disaster. Adobe seems to have a phenomenally poor understanding of and lack of respect for the web, it’s amazing they can still sell web tools. Or maybe that’s why most people I know don’t rely Adobe tools when building sites.
The situation of purchasing fonts from Adobe is equally frustrating, and barely seems to work. (no surprise, it’s a web service) Several different attempts have ended up in calls to font sales support because their system either doesn’t download the file, downloads an html file instead of the fonts or eventually sends a corrupted archive. In the end they ended up emailing the files. Keep in mind that all of this trouble is to legitimize the use of a font I already have a copy of. It’s no wonder there’s software piracy…
Apple’s new Sherlock 3 appears to have borrowed heavily from Dan Wood’s award-winning shareware tool Watson. When I first saw Watson I wondered how long it would last before all the various web sites it was scraping data from sued Karelia into submission. Any number of commercial sites’ content was being extracted and displayed by Watson, without advertising and without presenting each site’s branded interfaces. While incredibly useful, it’s easy see how Watson could be seen as content theft. I could also see how it’s not really that much different from me recounting any number of things I read from various news sources. The “problem” with information is it exists solely for people to share it.
Still as a shareware developer I’m troubled by this. Apple has a history of not exactly supporting developers well, especially in comparison to the way Microsoft coddles anyone even remotely interested in Redmond’s technologies.
I’ve said before that authorship is more important than copyright, and I think the generally negative reaction on the web proves my point. A whole lot of people already know about Watson, partly because Apple has been touting it as a brilliant OS X software gem. Apple should have at least offered Karelia something for proof of concept, good will is a non-tangible and an accepted expense which is often reported on quarterly financial statements. It wouldn’t have cost Apple very much, and bad press jeopardizing developer confidence costs far more.
Besides the obligatory Metafilter discussion, Scot Hacker comments on O’Reilly net, a somewhat heated MacSlash discussion, MacinTouch links to the Karelia FAQ, and the pre-MacWorld comments on VersionTracker.com are kind of interesting. Here are some other notable reactions from various blogs:
Doc Searls,
Michael Angeles,
Mike Benedetto,
Oliver Breidenbach,
Sunil Doshi,
Aaron Swartz,
Shawn Medero and
Oliver Wrede.
Ultimately, it was crappy of Apple, but this is business. Competition is vital, and even though Sherlock has a massive infrastructure to support it’s development, Watson has a head-start. Many of Joe’s Filters duplicate things Apple offers with Final Cut Pro, but ultimately improves on a common concept. Effective retrieval of information is not something which can be copyrighted or patented (unbelievably, it probably can be patented). Watson built on something Sherlock did poorly. Now Sherlock has picked up a lot of what Watson was doing.
I registered a copy of Watson to protest Apple’s actions and to support an innovative software developer. Thankfully it’s a great application which I’ll use. I’m not going to make some absurd proclamation like “Delete Sherlock 3 from 10.2!” because I might not. We’ll see which one is actually better.
Between the Watson debacle and turning iTools into a pay service, I can’t remember the last time Apple made this many people angry.
Random email: This morning I received a letter from a woman asking about a problem playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein, which she’d bought for her husband. My immediate suspicion was an email address harvesting letter, where anyone who replies confirms a functioning address. However the headers (*@bellsouth.net) seemed real and there are two people listed in Georgia with this name. (Georgia is BellSouth’s most populous area) After a little poking around, I decided to take a chance, be an optimist and reply. Considering that Macworld put my primary email address online this month, it’s not like I’m expecting a spam-free mailbox.
I know next to nothing about troubleshooting PCs and haven’t played RtCW (though I did play Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple ][+ back 1981
). The error message she sent included the line “failed to find an appropriate PIXELFORMAT” which is probably how she found me since I’m the first English result on Google when searching for PIXELFORMAT. Apparently she’s not the only one with the problem. Maybe if Activision’s support pages were easier to find, answers like this would actually help their customers.
