Some combination of screwy net access and a LiquidWeb mail server upgrade resulted in my Inbox duplicating all of the enclosed messages. Since I’m nowhere near inbox zero the glitch resulted in a few thousand messages to wade through. I figured I wasn’t the first to deal with this, and quickly found two scripts which id’d duplicate messages: Tim Auton’s Select Duplicates and Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts. I ended up going with Time Auton’s script because of his description and a quick review of his code. The script finished quickly enough (running from Script Editor) and left me with all the duplicated messages selected and ready to review and delete.

The LiquidWeb mail upgrade caused another problem, my IMAP folders were now grouped inside my Inbox. The solution was to add the IMAP prefix “INBOX” to the account settings, as shown here:

And yes, I do really have that many active email accounts. Pity me.

The CalDav project Calendar Server is looking to be very, very good.

It’s an open source server supporting full read-write calendars, availability blocking, delegations, notifications, directory integration and more. I’m going to be setting up a few of these once we start migrating to Leopard.

I’m not loving the new desktop. It’s hard to believe that after all these years of publicly mocking Microsoft and Vista, Apple appears to be aping one of the ugliest and most useless features of Vista: Aero.

The transparent menu bar is a disaster. Michael Tsai agrees, calling it “insane.” Looking around the conference it’s easy to tell which machines are running Leopard, they’re the ones with the horrid acid-pastel menubars. The first corrective solution, Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was posted a few hours after the keynote. Personally, I would have called it a de-uglifier.

The interaction of windows butted up against the menubar is also sub-optimal. In all previous OS X iterations, there has been a faint grey line at the base of the bar. That prevented windows from visually grouping with the menubar. Now that the bar relies on whatever incidental color is leaching through, window title bars appear to clump up with the menubar.

About the Dock’s new glowing blue LED blob: Didn’t we learn our lesson after putting the original iMac’s into Aqua’s menus? Or Brushed Metal? Mimicking physical elements do not necessarily make for good computer interface design. This is looking dated already and it’s only been a day.

The faux-perspective Dock floor implies the bottom edge of a portal into a 3d space. The problem here is that the windows go behind the furthest edge of the Dock’s floor. That means we’re sort of looking into a box and our windows, the most important content, are psychologically far away from us, all the way down at the bottom. Nevermind that the menubar doesn’t exist in that space in any logical way. Having seen Beryl’s true 3D windows, the Finder feels flat and dated. And that oversized drop shadow is so big it’s nearly comical, except that we might have to live with it for a year or two.

Stacks. Like so much else, they demo well. Beyond that they’re really strange, especially regarding usability. I guess it will be nice to see the icon of the last-downloaded item (or newest item in a folder), even if that means I’ll always have a DMG, ZIP or unremarkable text file down there. Most of the time we’ll be hitting the Downloads stack to get to the most recent download, but here Stacks defies logic and moves that icon to the farthest position from the mouse. (this seems to be a Leopard design pattern) It seems to me that the most recent thing should be closest to the mouse. Also, and I don’t know the exact number, but beyond a certain amount of files, stacks revert to a limited grid view which shows a few dozen items. My Downloads folder is a junk collector, currently there are 225 items crufting away in there. Stacks are mostly useless for me.

In the WWDC keynote, right around 1:18:30, Scott Forstall’s nervous typo started a slide which ended up knocking about $5 billion dollars off of Apple’s market cap.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the typo, though I felt it in my gut the instant that happened. The stock’s drop from the mid-124s down to nearly 120 almost exactly matches the duration of the iPhone web apps section of the keynote. Rumors and expectations can be expensive.

My initial reaction to the Keynote was fairly positive. While it was a little short on new stuff and heavy on spinning questionably functional features, there were some really funny moments, some suspense and we all had a good time.

Everyone at WWDC is under NDA, so I’m not going to cover anything which hasn’t already been covered, featured on Apple’s site or mentioned in the press. Considering how much attention Apple’s getting these days, there’s quite a lot to talk about.

My thoughts started to sour when I had a chance to use 10.5 and really try out the new features. The whole of Leopard often just feels thrown together in a hap dash sort of way. Bits and pieces of one app are in other apps Todos and RSS in Mail? Coverflow everywhere? Shiny Dock backgrounds? This is called bloat when Microsoft does it.

Rather than try and finish one monster post like my predictions post, I’m going to eke out shorter, more topical posts as I have time. Those posts will all be linked from here.

Posts:

• The $5 billion typo
• Interface

The rumor mill is exceptionally quiet this year, I’m probably more excited because of that. Quoth Fake Steve Jobs:

Arrive early, wear comfortable clothes, and prepare to have your mind blown. Because this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we’ve ever had. Seriously.

Here are a few rumor roundups: TUAW, MacRumors.

I’m not expecting any new hardware. It’s too close to the iPhone release and there haven’t been any major recent hardware developments. The only potential outlier is some sort of ultra-portable based in part on Intel’s mobile Metro notebook or that new Dell ultra-portable. Even if that is coming, I don’t think it will be announced here. This show is about what can be made with software. Even the t-shirt says so.

Sun’s slip about ZFS in Leopard is probably true. ZFS is just too good for Apple not to use it. Time Machine with a ZFS backend becomes efficient and practical.

I think it might be technically possible to convert an active drive from HFS+ to ZFS, in-place, without any additional hardware. The foundations are in place, Boot Camp has proven that HFS partitions can be dynamically resized. ZFS seems to be astonishingly robust and inherently malleable The process might take a few hours, but I think the shocking thing is that, if you have a few gigabytes of free space on your HFS drive, it will be possible to convert a drive from HFS to ZFS without reinitializing the whole thing. But I have no direct experience with ZFS, so I could be completely wrong here.

Core animation will prove to be central to the entire Leopard experience. Everything will have transitions, animations and eye-candy–however small and fast. Apple knew what it was doing with the Dashboard animations, and they’re going to run with it, not just in the iPhone, but throughout the MacOS. Apple isn’t competing with Aero here, the really amazing UI-candy to beat is mostly coming from Beryl/Compiz

An Apple virtualization product/feature doesn’t seem likely. Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are providing a load of value in this area and it doesn’t make sense to shake up an already healthy competitive marketplace. Apple only benefits from those two companies trying to outdo one-another, providing an integrated virtualization product doesn’t seem to make sense from a business standpoint.

I really hope there’s some integration between some of the Google apps and the iApps. Especially read/write from iCal to Google Calendar, but I’d just settle for allowing multiple people to work on the same calendar with iCal via .Mac.

We might see a radical re-casting of the iLife and iWork components. The various applications have proven different levels of usefulness and some seem far more important than others. Personally I don’t even have GarageBand, iWeb or Pages on my machine anymore, I needed the space and they are all pretty big. iTunes is it’s own universe, there’s absolutely no reason it should be a part of iLife, besides it’s too tied to development of iPods and Windows. iPhoto is the gorilla of iLife, it should probably be rolled into Leopard and let iLife be a suite of creative apps, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband. iWork is more coherent, but keynote is the component that I see getting the most use. Maybe Apple will finally introduce the long-rumored Charts, but this doesn’t seem like the place. Un-rolling iPhoto would cut into iLife’s sales, but it would fit in with the “whole package” idea that Steve mentioned last time.

Random predictions:

• Developers will complain about the food.
• AAPL will go into the $130s, possibly as high as $135 if there’s good iPhone news.
• Developers will complain about not getting bussed to Cupertino for the annual bash
• More alcohol than just beer and wine will be served at the SF party although some people actually prefer just wine since they know what to look for, still many people will get unpleasantly drunk and Friday morning’s sessions will be poorly attended and full of moaning.

Pie-in-the-sky hope: Apple will have iPhones on hand and offer Developers the chance to buy one and start using it this week, before anyone else gets them. Yeah, this is completely nuts and not going to happen. While it would turn several thousand developers into Apple indentured servants, completely cowed vassals ready to do Apple’s bidding. It would also piss off all the international attendees who wouldn’t be able use it yet.

Not a WWDC prediction per se, but I am certain that there will be several dozen articles and blog posts about errors typing with the iPhone. Someone (probably some apple-hater on c-net) will attempt to enter Jabberwocky, just like Robert McNally on his Newton in 1993, and try to hype the hell out of whatever comes out. I share some of Steven Frank’s concerns about the touch screen, that thing had better work.

So one of my credit card numbers got jacked and was being used for an incredibly useless shopping spree; all sorts of crap I didn’t order is showing up in my mailbox but well at least I’m getting card travel rewards. Good job morons.

Whoever did this either guessed my email or googled me. Records of fraudulent purchases came to both my normal email and my gmail account, which I don’t give out and rarely use. It almost seems like someone was deliberately trying to sabotage me, however the GMail account is such an outlier that I doubt it.

Credit card theft most often happens when someone takes a receipt from a store or restaurant. I rarely use this card physically, so I’m pretty sure I know precisely where and when the number was taken.

In a way, this episode might be an argument for lack of privacy, aka open secrets. I have a listed phone number, I still google well and, much as it sometimes makes me nervous, especially as a parent, it’s just not that difficult to find out information about me. That same information might be the reason I was able to find out about this fraud quickly instead of waiting several weeks until my credit card statement showed up.

I first noticed this because a slew of subscriptions to Jagex/RuneScape showed up in my email. Initially I thought these were just more spam, so I waited a day to call my card’s issuing bank. I wrote Jagex and they were very helpful, refunded all charges and blocked the card from future purchases.

Columbia House and BMG Music Club present an incredibly sleazy face to the world. Trying to get a phone number on their websites is just about pointless.

BMG had several numbers listed though most were “no longer in service”, thankfully one referred me to another number where I was finally able to get a person after pressing zero repeatedly. The phone number for BMG was 317-692-9200.

Columbia House was worse, there were no numbers I could find on the site. I ended up getting their corporate phone number via whois (then I found it in several other places relating to the corporation). The number for Columbia House is 212-596-2000, tell them you’re calling to pursue a fraud case and they get you to a person very quickly.

With both BMG and Columbia House, once I got a person on the phone they were very helpful.

Citibank’s fraud division has been amazing and I’m really not worried about having to pay for any of this stuff. Mostly I am worried that my email address, which I’ve been using for over 10 years, might be polluted to the point that I can no longer use it for purchases.

The only thing I definitely won’t be able to get back are the hours spent dealing with this.