“Remember back in late 2002 or early 2003 when all the hot web designers were pushing table-less designs that only used CSS and they came up with all these crazy workarounds to do simple things like a three-column layouts, and all the hip sites started to look the same, you know, floating CSS boxes all over the place, and then Microsoft said they were canceling Internet Explorer for Mac, and that there wouldn’t be anymore stand-alone browsers for Windows and that they may never fully support all those web-standards and that PNGs would never work, ever, and then everyone started to realize that all the old web tricks using tables for layout still worked, and worked everywhere, and were faster to build and easier to maintain and the only real web standards were whatever worked in Explorer?”

“Yeah.”

“That was crazy.”

me: the Rabbi and Priest were going back and forth like ontological ping pong
me: it was fun
me: did I use ‘ontological’ correctly?
Bruce: Yea, it sounded convincing to me.
me: well technically, ontological means “The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.“
me: so theological would have possibly been more specific
me: although I like the way ontological feels in the mouth
me: ew

My family moved to Irvine when I was seven or eight years old, probably 1979. We were the first to live in the house my parents still live in, I remember walking through it with my mother and younger brother before it was finished, no carpeting or railings, just bare concrete where the piano would one day sit. It was sometime around Easter, we ate chocolate bunnies.

With two kids, my parents were sort of the old timers among the young parents moving into Peppermill Run. On one side our neighbors were newly married and in my memory younger than I probably realized. He still had a lot of the high school jock in him, drove a 280Z sports car with personalized plates and could throw a football farther than I’d ever seen one thrown. With a perfect spiral. After a few years they had a daughter and a son. I remember when each one came home for the first time.

Across the street a field was graded out for houses which would be built a few years later. This was a natural gathering place for neighborhood kids. The gradings which would one day define property lines and backyard fences made perfect jumps for boys on dirt bikes. Sometimes we’d fly kites, other times we would ask for a ride on the elektroroller scooter that the coolest kid in town used to own. Mostly the kids would torture one another, pick fights and generally make each other’s lives miserable. Though I can readily call up the humiliation, pain and anger, those days still seem like magic.

When the houses finally went in across the street, more people with kids moved in. Or, more specifically, people moved in and had kids. My youngest brother was born around then, and there was quite a handful of young children who would all play together. Directly across the street, a couple moved in who seemed to have a ton of money. He had art on the walls, real art, not prints or art-fair paintings. Two huge drawings of skyscrapers in his stairwall were by Richard Bunkall, whom I studied painting with at Art Center. A few years ago Richard died of complications from ALS.

Their next door neighbors had a boy and a girl. Their father, a young and apparently heathly man in his 40s died of a heart attack. I never knew what to say to them. Shortly after, the well-off art collector didn’t come home. His wife and two kids moved a few years later. The year was somewhere around 1985.

The people two doors down are the reason I started writing this. Similar to our other neighbors, they were young and newly married. As either a side business or a hobby or both, he used to die-cast tiny model-train people at a workbench in their garage. They had two sons.

This past weekend, Al, their youngest son, died. He was 18. Al and his father were camping in the desert on an exceptionally hot day and had car trouble. On the way to find help he collapsed from the heat. His father found his body.

In my mind those kids are still kids. Almost a decade and a half has passed, the trees are taller, the plants filled in and most of the children have left home. I’ve never seen them as adults and can barely remember some of their names. I only knew them as babies.

San Bernardino County Sun
KABC TV
OC Register
KESQ TV

Amazing how these things come back around, and in the most unexpected places.

2 weeks later WWDC recap:

Since the entire conference was under NDA (Non-Discloser Agreement), I can’t really go into specifics about most of the stuff that was talked about. Unless Apple’s already made it public…

Overall, Apple seems really healthy. I must not be alone in that assessment since Apple’s stock just posted a new 52-week high. Moving to IBM chips is long overdue and the performance of the new G5s is going to be mind-blowing. The thing they didn’t and couldn’t mention during Jobs’ keynote was how poorly the current G4s did against the P4s. Once the G5s are released, it’ll be interesting to see Mac vs. Mac benchmarks. I expect we’ll see speed increases of at least double over the previous generation of G4s. Because of IBMs resources, these chips are only going to get better. The days of Apple being hamstrung by Motorola’s lethargic semiconductor division are over.

G5

The G5 boxes are beautiful. The front and back grills are not just cosmetic and the internal fans are subtly visible from the front. The side door is not hinged, and instead comes completely off. The door itself feels great. Bruce has been talking for years about building a computer case out of CPU heatsinks, in a lot of ways, Apple just did. Besides the multiple fans and ‘cooling zones’, the case itself should help to disperse heat.

The handles are not going to be fun to hold for any length of time. These are big boxes, heavier and taller than the current towers they’ll be replacing.

Panther

Panther is going to be another huge step forward but there are still a number of kinks to work out. As much as I’d like to, I won’t be running this fulltime until much closer to the final release. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s definitely faster, the interface is improved and a lot of issues with Jaguar seem to have been fixed. The Finder however, is not so great so far. I find myself frequently feeling lost when working with multiple windows and resenting the amount of space the sidebar takes up. Partly I probably just need to get used to it, but there are things I hope get fixed.

The best feature by far is Expose, which is really a radical evolution of the way people interact with computer windows. It kind of reminds me of the memory computers from Minority Report, only practical and easy to understand. This feature will become immediately useful as soon as it’s out.

Multi-user login switching is just very, very cool. The cube spin is gratuitous and completely perfect. I’m probably going to keep a presentation user account on my machine so I can quickly give demonstrations without having to clean anything up.

Font Book

Font Book has gotten a little press, partly about how it will be grabbing the market away from several small companies who make font managers. I think it’s got more to do with Apple identifying a very important area that was being underserved. Over the past year I’ve started to writing several essays about how the font-management situation in OS X was a disaster. There were three main players, the venerable Suitcase from Extensis, Font Reserve and Font Agent Pro. I’ve tried all three, and they’ve all got tons of room for improvement.

I first saw Font Reserve 1.0 at MacWorld Boston years ago and bought a copy on the spot. It was the ultimate tool for type geeks and came with tens of thousands of pre-defined classifications for various fonts. On OS 9, the browser worked well but I never felt it was easy enough to use to recommend to any designers I work with. Font Reserve was fantastic at managing massive font libraries but the interface was always somewhat amateurish and there certain bugs which never got fixed. The application’s transition to OS X was clunky and the interface unfortunately seemed to get worse.

Suitcase probably had the best interface of the set, but it’s very clumsy when managing large font libraries. This seems to be the most popular of the current choices, but it’s still buggy and Extensis’ engineering solutions usually involve bundling something (Font Doctor) or buying someone. Point of fact; Extensis just bought Diamondsoft, publisher of Font Reserve. Hopefully they’ll be able to bring their two technologies together and merge their strengths instead of their weaknesses.

Font Agent Pro is the one most likely to be hurt by Apple’s decision. They’re a small company, making the transition from Shareware. Their application probably had the most robust backend, but it’s interface was just horrible. I watched several people struggle to try and use it, but each version failed to address the huge usability hurdles and instead built upon those and tried to make bad decisions work. Hopefully they’ll focus on the font-repair utility side of their product which was fantastic.

iChat

iChatAV just totally works. Lila’s grandmothers are already benefiting since she’s much better at video chat than she is at the phone. Biggest bummer is that video only works with G3s 600Mhz or faster and our home iBook was too slow. The iSight is a really beautiful gadget and a nice convenience though it probably can and will be much smaller in the future.

Two best hidden features of iChat:

1. One-Way Video Chat: Control-click on anyone in the buddy-list or Rendezvous list to send a one-way video chat. The receiving person will be able to view the video and send audio. Unfortunately this still doesn’t work with sub-600Mhz G3 macs.
2. The iSight can be used to generate new buddy icons. Click on the icon, choose Edit Picture and then click use Video Snapshot.

I’m not certain, but the codec appears to be a modified flavor of the H.263 Video Codec called Apple VC H.263.

If you don’t have an AOL or .Mac account, you can get a free.mac account or a free AOL Instant Messenger account. For AOL, click ‘Get a Screen Name’ in the yellowish box on the right. This is how millions of pre-teens get around AOL’s parental controls.

The WWDC’s 802.11b network was overloaded and it was difficult to get a DHCP lease. The 802.11g network generally seemed to work, but the 12 and 17 inch PowerBooks were still far outnumbered by 15 inch Titaniums and iBooks of various sizes–none of which could use the 802.11g network yet. (There were a few people seemed to have PCMCIA wireless cards hanging out of their Titaniums). The most annoying part was that connectivity was severely hampered by a number of people setting up ad-hoc computer-to-computer networks on the same channels as the official networks. It’s amazing that so many alpha-geeks can be so clueless about wireless networking.

During the conference I noticed that instead of talking with strangers about the weather, as people are wont to do, attendees would talk to each other about the wireless network. Still a brief chat about the air, just a bit more specific. In describing what was happening with the network, I referred to the air as mud. Later I realized that was probably a painting metaphor used to describe the sludgy mess resulting from poor color mixing or the mess at the bottom of a brush cleaning jar. Most everyone besides Bruce probably thought I was talking about dirty water. Which I guess still applies.

I got to meet a few people I’ve read or talked with. Derrick Story, who I published my article earlier this year, is actually taller than me. So was Craig Hockenberry from IconFactory. I met Steven Frank from Panic Inc. briefly, but he was busy trying to get one of his many PDAs to bridge his laptop to an outside network so we didn’t talk long. Somehow I thought he’d be older, which is probably a compliment. (I saw Steven fiddling with some device or another several times, he really is obsessed). Adam Wilt knew who I was, which shocked me. Considering how much of my video knowledge grew from articles he’s written, it was really great to get to spend time talking with him. I also got to spend a lot of individual time with the Final Cut Pro team, got some really valuable feedback and learned a lot.

I give up. Spam Assassin is now enabled for my email. Hopefully there won’t be too many false positives, although I’m not sure how much worse that would be than losing messages in the massive pile of crap I currently receive.

I’m at Apple’s WWDC all week filling my head with new stuff. Here’s an iCal page of my planned schedule.

The wireless network at the conference is 99% hosed so I’m not really able to check or respond to email.