Last year I wrote about Mac Virtual Desktops, focusing mostly on You Control: Desktops. I ended up buying a license and last week they released version 1.3 beta 2

Some of the good stuff I noticed right away:

• Customizable color for the highlighted desktop in the menu bar. The previous beta used a hard-coded red outline which was ghastly.

• Behavior of the cursor on edge-screen flipping. It can now be set to mimic Compiz/Beryl, where the cursor starts at the opposite edge of the next screen. So if you drag a window off the left side, it appears on the next desktop on the right side. With a transition like Cube or Pan, I find this to be spatially very intuitive. The cursor can also be set to remain in place, for transitions like Slide, it feels like you’re holding a window while the current desktop just gets out of the way beneath it. Not sure which one I prefer, but the options are a huge improvement.
• Overall, the speed of transitions and switching feels much faster, especially on the more graphics intensive effects.

Feedback I’m sending to the developers:

• Fade, Swirl, Twist and Zoom still use an additive composite, which means they pretty much always blow out to white during the transition and then pop to the next screen. It’s uncharacteristically ugly.

• Cursor repositioning seems to wait for some mouse movement before redrawing dragged windows. If the mouse is kept perfectly still, the dragged window will remain at the position it was pre-transition, then pop into place when the mouse is moved again.

  It would be fantastic if the dragged windows could be composited before the transition or in the transition buffer, I think it would be perceptible and intuitively support the various repositioning options. If you’re doing that, might as well update the menu-bar icon’s status pre-transtion too. It’s disorienting to see it show up wrong and then update — the menu bar should reflect the new state before the transition finishes.

• Hardware support for extra mouse buttons would be fantastic.
• Hot key assignment is way too clumsy.

While I go through phases of using and not using virtual desktops, if you want multiple desktops on your Mac right now and can’t wait for Spaces in Leopard (which doesn’t do as much), YC:Desktops is the way to go.

Finally, my friend Heins Kim has his artwork online, and it looks great. All of his work is crafted with exceptional detail, zoom in by rolling over the large image.

It’s hard to appreciate some of the works online, many of the paintings and drawings are completely different from various distances and angles. Also be sure to check out the photos accompanying his Bio.

Until I get the Nike+iPod thing, I’m going to post my runs here and just keep bumping it to the top.

Sunday July 29:

4 miles on the treadmill

Tuesday July 31:

4 miles on the west side with Harris and Kai. We went before lunch at around 1pm, it was hot.

August 2:

5.5 Miles in 46 minutes. Personal best by 10 minutes and 1 mile.

August 5:

5 miles in 40 minutes. I was angry about something when I started so I ran the first three miles pretty fast.

August 8:

2.5 miles, sort of fast. Ran after an exhausting day.

August 12:

5 miles up First Ave to 64th and then down Second. Hills kicked my butt, left knee was a bit tight. Route

August 16

3 miles on the treadmill at the Y. My left knee is sore.

August 20

2 miles on the treadmill, after a lot of stretching and 3 miles on a stationary bike. Felt fine and could have kept going, but my knees are still hurting more than they should be.

this post should really be a category with multiple short posts. Adding to to do list…

The Ecamm brothers got two-way video conferencing working between two iPhones. As good as I think the iPhone is now, just wait a few months when this thing is really broken open. (link via Buzz @ C4)

I don’t know why I’ve waited this long (ok I do, my life has a density), I’m jailbreaking my phone tonight.

Post updated, jump directly to the improved solutions.

I spent the better part of today remotely trying to figure out why our latest Creative Suite 3 installation was crashing. Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all crashed when saving. CS3 (Design Premium) was being installed onto a new 24" iMac, everything else with the machine is fine.

For whatever reason, CS3’s shared VersionCueUI.framework component was not installed. Here’s what was showing multiple times in the logs of the problem machine:

2007-08-10 19:30:33.926 Adobe InDesign CS3[919] CFLog (21): Cannot find executable for CFBundle 0x2e1b5a50 </Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/VersionCueUI.framework> (not loaded)

Even though we aren’t using Version Cue (I’ve yet to meet anyone who does), that component is necessary for all save functions. If it can’t be called, as I found to be the case here, all CS3 apps will crash out immediately upon invoking Save or Save As. We aren’t installing the Version Cue server on any stations, but I did try installing it once to see if that would fix this. It didn’t.

I re-installed. I repaired. I wiped everything with maccs3clean, restarted and reinstalled — three times. From two different accounts. If you’ve ever installed CS3, you know how much time that eats.

Then I gave up on the installer.

Checking /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/ against a functioning install showed that VersionCueUI.framework had the wrong byte-count. I decided to try replacing it with a copy from a working installation.

Starting from a working installation, I tgz’d the framework with this command:

tar -cvzf ~/VersionCueUI.framework.tgz VersionCueUI.framework

Next I copied the archive to the machine with the problem install, untarred it, moved the bundle to the right directory and changed ownership to root:admin:

tar xvfzp VersionCueUI.framework.tgz

then

sudo chown -R root:admin VersionCueUI.framework 

I’m sure there’s an easy way to integrate user, groups and permissions into the tar commands to save the chown, but after a day of dealing with this I wasn’t in the mood to look it up.

After that, saving from various CS3 appears to be working perfectly and updates installed without errors.

This experience was very similar to the solution I found to my Illustrator 13.0.1 upgrade problems. Manually doing the installer’s job solved the problem there too.

Dear CS3 Installer,
Thanks so much for ejecting the DVD after a failed install. Everyone I called to shove the DVD back in for me were really glad they could help.

Update: Several great self-contained solutions in comments, I’ll be trying these first if I run into this again. Thanks to everyone who posted.

• Dave Pijuan-Nomura’s solution looks the simplest and builds on Dusty’s earlier method:
  1. Delete /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0
  2. Run Adobe Updater
• Dusty was first to report success after deleting /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/. He also paused Adobe Updater to make a copy of the Version Cue installer, Updater will otherwise delete the file after the install fails. That standalone updater now appears to be here: Adobe Version Cue CS3 client 3.1.0 update.
• Dave Henderleiter got it working by renaming an older version of Version Cue:
  

  In [/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/]… I had a 3.1.0 version and a 3.0.0 version. I deleted the 3.1.0 version and renamed 3.0.0 to 3.1.0 and all the apps worked right away without even a restart.

  Faking CS3 into using older component versions makes me nervous, but several people reported success with this method.

A little over a month ago I finally gave in and started playing around with Twitter.

I like how thin and open Twitter is. There is no proscribed way of how it works. Some people post what they’re doing, some post thoughts, others simply reply to other’s posts. Posts, usually called “tweets”, are limited to 140 characters, a hard limit that enforces brevity.

Starting out feels awkward. At first, it can feel like looking in at the super-clique — except that you’ve been gagged and no one can see you. Most of the people I’m following I’ve met briefly or know online. Most of them aren’t following me. I don’t dwell on it. At least initially, I’ve decided to follow anyone who follows me, except spammers. So far I haven’t culled my list.

After a few days, it starts to get interesting. At times it seems like nothing more than a rolling IM status message. After a week it starts to feel like it should have always been there.

I’ve found Twitter to be a surprising motivator. That probably has something to do with my inherent belief that I’m never doing enough. I want to seem busy, so I have to get busy. Or busier. There is a water-cooler quality to Twitter which is nice when your office is largely virtual.

There’s another interesting thing, probably a result of how transitory messages are; people often post quick little links to their newest blog posts or whatever. I tried that and was astonished at how many clickthroughs I got.

Having previously referred to Twitter as “a spam-free pub-sub channel for direct communication,” Dave Winer also posted this very effective description:

[Twitter] is a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following. I can follow you, and you can follow me. Or I can follow you and you don’t follow me. Or you can follow me, and I don’t follow you. Or neither of us follow each other. Pretty simple. Just arrows at either or both ends of the line, or no line at all. There are no labels on the arcs.

That really sums it up. Feel free to follow me, I’ll happily return the favor.

If you’re on a Mac, I highly recommend getting the free Twitterific from IconFactory.

This flash US obesity infographic was mentioned to me as part of an ongoing discussion about information graphics. The original source data likely came from the PPT presentation linked on the CDC’s Overweight and Obesity page. The CDC maps present annual data from 1985-2005, CNN only chose to show six incongruous years to remove edge-case fluctuation. I threw together a quick animation showing the complete dataset:

Michelle observed that the bar for information graphics was set “very, very low.” People are accustomed to lousy graphics, default-styled PowerPoint charts, plain Excel tables and raw scatter plots. Even the slightest attention to design becomes automatically exceptional.

I think that map chart would work better as a line plot, but then I’m most curious about whether or not there was a tipping point after which the population started gaining weight. Personally, I believe things turned for the worse between 1985 and 1988.

Mid-80s transition

In 1985, amidst the New Coke fiasco, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks switched from cane and beet sugar to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Two main factors figured into that decision: Significantly increased potency and effectiveness of HFCS vs conventional sugars, and cost savings due US government corn subsidies and manipulation of domestic sugar prices. Bottom line was that soda got much cheaper to produce, thereby making “free refills” and oversized portions an economically sound loss-leader.

Three years later in 1988, Taco Bell introduced unlimited free drink refills and 7-Eleven started selling the 64-ounce Double Gulp, “biggest soft drink on the market.” I couldn’t find a source, but that was doubtlessly a response to escalating portions and unlimited refills among competitors. This was also about the time the soda manufacturers started experimenting with 16 ounce cans, 20 ounce bottles and other larger portions.

The following chart illustrates domestic per capita consumption of soft drinks from 1970-1995. Note the spike between 1987-1988:

Soda got cheaper, so people drank more soda. Snack foods also got cheaper as they also switched from sugar to HFCS, so people ate more snacks. More soda + more snacks = more obesity. This isn’t rocket science.