So I was 6 for 25, ouch. That’ll teach me for throwing too many things out there. How’d other MacHeads do?

• Dan Benjamin: 4 of 18, also totally wrong about the iPhone.
• Mike Davidson: 3 of 10, mostly right about the iPhone.
• Steven Frank: 1 for 2, he’s going to be very, very happy in June. (yep)
• John Gruber: 5 of 13, he got the iPhone mostly right.
• Daniel Jalkut: Let’s say 50%, he was kind of vague and didn’t mention OS X.

In all of our defense, the fact that there was absolutely no mention of 10.5 severely affected our scores. A bunch of these predictions will probably come to pass whenever Apple gets around to demoing Leopard.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, congratulations to Bruce for landing himself in the 9th row.

iPhone

Best wrong quote about the iPhone comes from Steven Frank again:

“Apple’s about “the whole widget” and I can’t imagine them making you suffer some idiot at a Cingular store who can’t figure out which data plan you need, but it’s probably this one ’cause he heard that MACs have a problem with this other one because MACs don’t use TCP/IP networks or DNS and you have to use the AppleTalk Chooser or something I dunno Gary the Apple Guy should be back after lunch but check out this awesome RAZR.

While I’m suitably blown away by the iPhone, there is quite a bit of lingering disappointment that this great phone will still be hamstrung by Cingular’s crappy contracts and customer service. Somewhat pathetically, Cingular may be rebranded as AT&T (once again) by the time the iPhone goes on sale.

My cell phone, of which I am not fond, is currently through Verizon. We’ve got a somewhat convoluted multi-phone business/family plan, so it’s probably going to be a pain in the butt to move to Cingular. Yay.

There’s plenty of griping in the IRC channels about being Cingular only. I agree that it definitely feels like a letdown. If it were Cingular with a complete re-thinking of the contract and customer service model, I’d be more excited. Cingular itself was the only real choice since  the other large US wireless carriers are all CDMA networks. But no matter how great the phone is, contracts and the same-old cell phone service crap will bring down the whole experience. Perhaps it was a bad omen that Jobs clickers broke after Cingular took the stage.
On the positive side, it seemed as though the iPhone will be able to run third-party apps. If it really is running MacOS X, then Mac developers should be able to port their apps to run on the phone without too much fuss. This is outstanding news and could finally lead to the level of personalization and customization I’ve dreamed about having in a phone.

AppleTV

Very surprising that the AppleTV will be shipping without common Standard Definition connectors. Essentially it’s a HD playback device with no clear source of HD content aside from movie trailers. The AppleTV TV Compatibility description underlines this:

Enhanced-definition or high-definition widescreen TVs capable of 1080i 60/50Hz, 720p 60/50Hz, 576p 50Hz (PAL format), or 480p 60Hz

Those are all HDTV or recent SDTV requirements. HD has to come to iTunes soon.

The Name Change

I’m curious whether or not Apple’s name change to Apple Inc. has anything to do with the most recent Apple Corps lawsuit and the Beatles music library. Jobs used “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” for one of the demos, either he was taunting Apple Corps’ or something is up with iTunes and the Beatles.

AAPL

Wow. While Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, the value of Apple increased by more than 5 billion dollars. Five billion dollars, out of thin air, because of a great speech and a new product that won’t ship until June.

Update: Wow, was I ever wrong about this one. Predictions are marked for accuracy below, thoughts are over here, this one is long enough already.

Below are my predictions and hopes for MWSF 2007.

iPhone

[Wrong] Not happening. This whole subject can very credibly be called a case of mass hysteria. While there is no doubt Apple is more than technically and creatively capable of creating a dream phone, there are just too many externally limiting factors for this product to succeed. Apple does not have the political resources to overcome the barriers currently in place.

Consider what a miserable experience it is to get cell service for one or two people, imagine what would be required to secure hassle-free access for millions of customers. Especially when you’re entering in to the agreement with a pitch like, “We need to use your network for our new phone. You don’t get to brand the connection or and you’ll have no input on service plans. Your phones are horrible and we’re about to make them look worse. And no, you can’t sell our phone because your customer service model sucks. We’re also working with your largest competitors so don’t screw us or we’ll cut you loose before you can say Zune.”

Besides the need to rise above the customer-hostile cellular phone marketspace, Apple would also likely be looking to leverage their other technologies, especially wifi [wrong]. Domestic cellular carriers are threatened by DIY ringtones, wifi internet phones are the beginning of the end of their entire industry even before companies start to use Burner Management Control Systems to secure the quality a good functioning of companies.

Additionally, Apple doesn’t appear to have a presence at CES. Not that they need it, but it would seem that a phone would benefit from getting seen in person and CES is significantly larger than MacWorld with a lot more media. However the iTV would also seem to be a CES product, though the buzz on this seems to be strangely muted.

The outlier is an unlocked phone [wrong]. In the US, no one has really done this, but if Apple was to succeed with an unlocked phone it could dramatically reshape the US cellular phone space. Personally, I don’t think the risk level is something Apple wants to wade into.

Considering the buzz on this, Apple’s stock is going to get hammered if there’s no phone, despite record laptop sales in Q4 2006 [sort of inversely right?].

I’m feeling about 90% certain these people are going to look silly. Unless I’m the one looking silly — as I run gleefully to the Apple Store to buy my new phone. [wrong, but I have until June to run there]

Mac Pros

[Wrong] Even though the Mac Pro is barely four months old, Intel’s quad-core chips are here and are pin-compatible with the dual-core chips currently in use. Switching to the new chips requires Apple do little more than print new stickers for the boxes. Eight cores should be shipping by February.

The pending release of Adobe’s CS3 (see below) makes me feel confident about this one. [wrong]

Leopard

We’ll get a release date for 10.5, I’m guessing sometime around March 1. [wrong]

The “Top Secret” features will be demonstrated. Developers will likely get a new seed with those features included. [wrong]

If ZFS is mentioned at all, it will likely be nothing more than a bullet point. A handful of people will cheer as if they just found religion.

Some iChat or wireless feature will be demonstrated with Phil Schiller. This is a lock. Everyone loves Phil Schiller. [right! x2]

Adobe

I was wrong about this at WWDC, but I think it’ll happen this time.

Either Adobe will demo CS3 on Intel during the Keynote or Quark will be invited onstage to show off XPress

[Nope, still wrong] Now, with the public Photoshop CS3 beta, I think there’s a very good chance Adobe will be onstage for a demo, showing CS2 on a G5 vs CS3 on one of the new 8-core Mac Pros. The Mac Pros will be, of course, silly-fast. Possibly a release date, probably April. Not much applause since everyone wants it yesterday. (I hope I’m wrong on this, Photoshop CS3 is very polished and very fast, we need inDesign.)

Airport and 802.11n

[Right: New Airport] [wrong, not a complete refresh] A complete refresh for the Airport product line bringing it up to 802.11n. Who doesn’t want more dependable wireless that’s 10 to 50 times faster? Apple’s been shipping 802.11n compatible hardware for a few months already and any potential success of the iTV thing will depend on better wireless internet. I wonder how they’ll handle upgrades for soldered on wireless like first-gen MacBook Pros?

The new Airports will be tightly integrated with iTV and may include a more direct gateway to the iTunes store. [wrong]

HD

The lack of a widely adopted HD disc format is hampering the transition to HD. A wedding videographer has to either invest in both authoring systems at huge cost or choose one; their customers would be risking locking their memories into what could be an obsolete format. The cost of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives is still stupid-expensive, but I could see Apple pushing to get some HD disc players and burners into their hardware. Unless they’re just going to give up on the HD format wars altogether and push iTunes as the real HD successor to the DVD. It’s probably too early for that, more home connections need to be upgraded, or at least have the option of upgrading, before that can happen. Besides, people still want to be able to share their own movies. [wrong]

Expect some sort of HD option in iTunes because of iTV. [astonishingly wrong]

iTV (or whatever it’ll be called)

I’m confused as to why people aren’t talking about this more. Maybe, like me, it just doesn’t seem that exciting. Expect 802.11n networking [right]. Since everything Apple sells online is pumped through Akamai, the speculation about an integrated BitTorrent client seems silly (even ignoring the movie studio aneurysms) [right].

iLife

[Wrong] I’m not expecting any new applications, though we’ll probably see a move toward the iTunes interface styling for the whole suite. Maybe AVCHD support for iMovie (and everything else via Quicktime), but that might be dreaming. I just want movies to share like photos and play in iPhoto slideshows. I like the idea of using iPhoto as a visual memory manager for your whole life.

iWork

[Wrong] The addition of a spreadsheet application makes sense for iWork. Hopefully Apple will rethink that category in the same way they approached Pages and produce something which focuses on producing great looking charts and graphs. Think Secret’s iWork screenshot is sort of hilarious, partly because it’s so ridiculously simple, and partly because that’s what the application could very well look like. However, while everything could be handled through floating palettes, that screenshot just seems to plain to be functional.

Hardcore number crunchers won’t be leaving Excel, but some sort of network data integration along with a well-defined scripting interface could open up some interesting possibilities for working with tabular data in new ways.

[Wrong] If the opening of the keynote contains a lot of charts and graphs, then this product is a lock. After introducing iWork 07, Steve will point out that all charts in his presentation were created with the new tools. This is a good thing since the 3d charts in iWork 06 are usually ineffective at communicating data and horrible looking.

.Mac

[Wrong] Something has to be done about .Mac. The only reason I renewed this year was because I use the account for iChat and sharing household calendars and didn’t have time to transition those features to other services and options. At very least, .Mac should include a full QuickTime Pro license. Well over a third of all bad email addresses from Joe’s Filters users are mac.com addresses; people who were using .Mac and quit.

Displays

[Wrong] Probably new displays with integrated iSight cameras. There is the outside chance that the pixel density could be increased in anticipation of Leopard’s resolution independence.

Surprises

[Wrong] There is still a ton of demand for a small laptop to replace the 12″ PowerBook. Apple must know about this. I can’t see Apple releasing a computer without a DVD drive because the psychology of it becomes too cumbersome. So that probably tosses out the sub-notebook form factor. However, there’s quite a bit of air inside a MacBook Pro and using the smaller iPod sized hard drive might be a possibility.

[Right!] No tablets. Too small a market and they’re just not that fun to use.

Stevenf’s razor

Panic’s Steven Frank shares a strategy for evaluating Apple related rumors:

Does the rumor contain the phrase “stripped-down version of Mac OS X”? If so, the rumor is almost certainly false.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

A comment on my last espresso machine post reminded me that I never really wrote about how the new machine worked out. So here’s that post.

The new machine is fabulous

It took a few days to start getting the hang of consistently good shots, but those first few cups made me realize what great espresso was really all about. My first thoughts were, literally, “Oh my God, what have I been drinking?” This is real espresso. Much as I loved my now deceased Barrista machine, it didn’t make espresso. It made pseudo-espresso, a dopplegänger imitation of what espresso should be. Basically it was just really strong drip coffee.

With the new Rancilio Sylvia, I immediately began tasting many more levels of flavor between beans. I now know what stale beans taste like. With the Barrista I could distinguish and enjoy the differences between high east African, Central American or Sumatran beans, but it turns out those flavors were masked and muddied. The taste difference is sort of like how our TV looked pretty good before seeing what HD could do. Since getting this machine I’ve only use darker, oily roasts, but the next trip to the coffee store I’m going to get several smaller bags of various beans and roasts.

The gateway drug dispensing gateway drug

It only took a few weeks before I bought a grinder (Baratza Solis Maestro Plus). Before, I would have the beans ground when buying coffee (from Porto Rico on St. Marks). Since I burn through a pound of coffee pretty quickly, I wasn’t too concerned about the ground coffee getting stale and as it turned out, the Barrista was masking the increasingly stale taste anyway. But the main reason for the grinder was that different beans and different roasts of different beans requiring slight adjustments to the grind.

Negatives

Much as I am loving the machine, there are a few areas where it could definitely be improved upon.

Noise. I haven’t opened it up yet to check if anything could be better dampened, but the machine is quite loud enough to make noise a concern.

Cooldown time. After steaming milk, there is a bit of a process to bring down the boiler temperature for espresso. What I do is flip the hot water switch and run the wand into the sink. At the same time I tend to run hot water through the empty portafilter. That makes sure the portafilter is at least somewhat heated, and clears leftover grinds from the inner screen. These steps are loud. Because of these steps, I’m not using the three-hole steaming tip I bought — it’s too much hassle to clear the wand into another container rather than the sink. I’m not sure about initial heatup times since my wife and kids tends to turn the machine on before letting me know it’s time to drag my butt out of bed. By the time I finally stumble into the kitchen, the machine is always ready to go.

A ball joint on the steaming wand would be welcome. I’m not the first person to bring this up, but there’s enough of a hacking community around this machine that I expect someone has already figured it out and will sell a kit eventually.

For some reason, if I don’t use enough coffee, my fancy 58mm tamper will bind the edges of the portafilter basket. I will probably buy some other portafilter baskets in the future. Unfortunately, after reading this, possibly more tampers too (those Pullman tampers are beautiful).

One more thing

While writing this, I stumbled across this super-modded Rancilio controlled by an original Nintendo gamepad. Wow.

Last year I posted Sixteen ways to spell Hanukkah, here’s an updated list showing this years counts for the various spellings:

• Hanukkah : 25,400,000 hits.
• Chanukah : 5,090,000 hits.
• Hanukah : 1,120,000 hits.
• Hannukah : 1,390,000 hits.
• Chanuka : 841,000 hits.
• Chanukkah : 439,000 hits.
• Hanuka : 954,000 hits.
• Channukah : 537,000 hits.
• Chanukka : 486,000 hits.
• Hanukka : 185,000 hits.
• Hannuka : 139,000 hits.
• Hannukkah : 82,400 hits.
• Channuka : 34,700 hits.
• Xanuka : 15,300 hits.
• Hannukka : 970 hits.
• Channukkah : 940 hits.
• Channukka : 644 hits.
• Chanuqa : 22 hits.

36,515,976 total hits. Again, Google’s index seems to have grown quite a bit, the total number of hits is more than double the total from 2005. This file contains my Hanukkah spelling counts for the past three years.

Thanks again to Jeremy Blachman for posting the 2004 numbers.

Happy Hanukkah, see you again in 2007.

After playing around with Beryl on Ubuntu, I started really wanting virtual desktops on my Mac. Beryl maps the workspace to a giant cube, which you can then grab and toss around. Windows can be dragged from one face of the cube to another, it’s intuitive and feels as natural as moving a stack of papers to the other side of my desk.

A while back I’d tried out Desktop Manager, but found it sort of clumsy. The most recent version had the same issues as before. VirtueDesktops, while far more polished, has many of the same issues.

I don’t like keyboard shortcuts for window stuff, I like to use the screen and mouse to move things around. Having to switch from a dragging operation to a keyboard operation and then back to dragging is just too many shifts of state. Window management on multiple desktops should use the same action model as multiple physical monitors.

By way of this comparative article from 2004, I found You Control: Desktops. Finally, someone got window management right. While that article seemed largely negative, I found YCD to be very polished and do nearly everything I was looking for. Window dragging between desktops just works. The popup pager is very well thought out and useful. Stability isn’t a problem. Unplugging my external monitor didn’t seem to cause any issues.

The only negatives I can come up with are:

• no list of hot-keys. They’re easy enough to set, but sometimes I forget what I’ve set and shortcuts don’t show in visual palettes
• No mouse-button binding options
• Price. YCD is expensive, especially considering 2/3 of the competition is free and Apple will be introducing Spaces in Leopard.

This may be going onto my system full time, however because of the price, I’m going to really measure how much this affects my productivity before buying.

Dragging windows between desktops is huge, I can’t imagine using virtual desktops without it. If Spaces doesn’t can’t do dragging, this app might live on in 10.5.

The project formerly known as DarwinPorts has spent the past few months transitioning to MacPorts. The project is now hosted on Mac OS Forge, after OpenDarwin decided to shutdown.

Unfortunately, the project appears to be foundering. To be fair, they’ve undertaken several fairly huge architectural challenges including moving from CVS to Subversion, from BugZilla to Trac and of course from OpenDarwin to MacOSForge. All of these moves are non-trivial undertakings especially considering the amount of data they must have.

While there has been a lot of port maintenance activity on the Trac revision log, what worries me is the lack of traffic on the MacPorts developer mailing list and the lack of news on the project site.

Worst of all, there is no obvious dowload link. It wasn’t that the link was just misplaced or buried, they kind of didn’t make one for this release. The 3.5 screens of wiki installation info should be bad joke, especially since a package manager exists to make one’s life easier.

Thankfully, some of the devs know this, and while pointing out why no download link is a problem, also pointed out a far better installation path. Here’s a far better way to get MacPorts up and running:

How to install MacPorts

1. Download the previous 1.3.1 dmg installer and install
2. In Terminal, run sudo port selfupdate

That two-step installation should be prominently displayed on the MacPorts site.

Two caveats to the above: Install XCode and the Developer tools, you’ll need the C compilers that install with it. If it doesn’t work after the above, check your PATH and default shell. I’ve had the best luck running bash. If echo $SHELL returns something other than bash, change the default in Terminal preferences (or NetInfoManager). The installer should have added ‘/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:’ to the $PATH declartion in ~/.profile, if it didn’t, add it yourself.

Why bother with any of this?

If you ever need to install some disparate piece of Unix software, I can’t recommend a port manager like MacPorts strongly enough. Get over the “I built that from code” puffery because unless you’re an old-hand Unix jock it takes way too long to track down and build the zillion required libraries, repeat steps and figure out where everything went. A port manager takes all the guesswork out of the process and makes maintenance of installed software easy (while writing this, MacPorts upgraded dozens of installed components and libraries in the background). I’ve tried Fink previously, but preferred the simplicity of MacPorts. Either one will make your life easier.

Yes there are occasional bad ports, or applications that don’t behave and bugger up the works. These usually get straightened out and can be avoided by trailing the bleeding edge by a few weeks. I will default to a binary installer when they’re available, but for all those other tools, a port manager is essential.

Recently, I’ve spent some time working with MediaWiki for Lila’s school’s web site. A small part of what I’ve been doing has been implementing an exisiting design onto the wiki backend. In an effort not to overcomplicate anything (think longevity) I built the entire design adaptation on the default MediaWiki MonoBook theme. Everyone who’s visited Wikipedia has seen what this looks like. Monobook is a very well constructed theme with clearly defined parts that degrade nicely without its stylesheets. So far, with the exception of these two small changes, I’ve able to do everything I needed to with the default page structure.

First change: Fixing bad portlet IDs

Editing Mediawiki:Sidebar allows for nearly complete customization of the sidebar links. Custom sections automatically get custom IDs which can then be styled. There is one thing that seems like a bug however: If a section heading has a space in it, the portlet ID will have an illegal name. Classes can have spaces in their selectors, but IDs can’t. Here’s what I did:

<div class='portlet' id='p-<?php echo htmlspecialchars($bar) ?>'>

and the new one:

<div class='portlet' id='p-<?php echo str_replace(' ', '_',htmlspecialchars($bar)) ?>'>

Simple enough, PHP’s str_replace is used to swap underscores for spaces. I’m still feeling my way around the MediaWiki codebase, so this might not be the best solution to the problem, but it does what it needs to with a very lightweight function.

Second change: Classes from page title

I needed to change the background of the globalWrapper element depending on the page, the way I accomplished this was to use the page-title. This has one initial drawback, namely that colons are not allowed in CSS class names. However the workaround above can be recast here with added benefit. Switching colons for spaces results in multiple class names, so namespaces can be styled too.

Here’s the old code:

<div id="globalWrapper">

And the new code:

<div id="globalWrapper" class="<?php echo str_replace(':', ' ', $this->data['titleprefixeddbkey'])?>">

This method would seem preferrable to adding a CSS import rule which would look for a custom-named file. Even though CSS load errors don’t break pages with visible 404 errors, they would slow down page loads and litter the server logs. Checking that the CSS file exists is somewhat costly, and I suspect MediaWiki’s cacheing isn’t something that can be quickly skimmed over and implemented.

There appears to be a pageCSS extension somewhere, the hooks are even specified in MonoBook’s header, but I couldn’t find a working download and CVS repository doesn’t seem to be working anymore.