Crazy Apple News Site

In Last Chance To See Douglas Adams talks about writing a program that is very sexy and has pull down menus and everything, and it’s entire purpose is to figure out the volume of the nests made by a certain kind of bird. In an article called “Frank The Vandal” he writes about a desire to be able to take just the parts of programs you want and paste them into a workflow so that you can do whatever it is you want to do without using six different programs. This is a mindset that resonates with me. If I can spend a few happy minutes¹ writing pointless software to solve a problem now instead of seconds taking care of it manually once a week I will definitely go for the pointless software. It was in this vein that I tackled the following

Extremely Small Problem:

I do a lot of what Natalie Goldberg calls “practice writing”. which is where you just block out some time and keep writing for that entire time. This writing can be directed, or not, but the goal is to keep moving forward, to keep putting words on the page, or, in my case, into the text document. This isn’t “real” writing that you plan to put in front of other people some day, this is just exercise, to keep those writing muscles in shape.

When you exercise your muscles, you aren’t left with an artifact of your exercise. But when you do writing exercise, you have this document that you created, and have to do something with it. It’s possible that some part of it might be worth something to you in some context, so it seems wasteful to just delete it. Once again referring to Natalie Goldberg, these are like compost; they’re not really valuable by themselves, but if you keep piling them up there’s a chance that someday something good will grow out of them. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that I would keep all these useless little documents, and I would keep them all in one folder, so they would stay out the way.

So, on my home Mac I set up Hazel to just take those documents, rename them to today’s date (which gives me a good record of which days I did my writing practice and which days I didn’t) and shove them in a folder. All of this happens without me thinking about it, because Hazel is awesome. So, here comes the extremely small problem:

Sometimes I do my writing practice on my laptop, which is a PC.

Because I’m insane and picky and whatnot I use FocusWriter on the PC² and FocusWriter, by default, produces Rich Text files (rtf files). BUT I have WriteRoom set to produce plain text files (txt files). It’s possible that I could just set FocusWriter to save things as txt files by default, but that’s crazy talk. Simple solutions need not apply, thank you very much. And I still have the problem of getting my little documents³ from my PC to my mac, and in the right folder.

Now, I grant you, I could move these files myself, but part of being who I am is having a rock-solid conviction that I shouldn’t be thinking about things if I can make a computer think about them for me. My ultimate goal is to be able to write something mindlessly and forget about it, secure in the knowledge that when I look for it⁴ it’ll be where I expect it to be.

After a little bit of thinking and a little more tinkering, I came up with the following

Gloriously Baroque Solution:

The moving parts involved here are (in order):

1. Dropbox
2. Hazel
3. Automator
4. Word 2011 for Mac
5. Hazel again

Here’s how it goes:

I write my useless document, and save it to a particular folder in my Dropbox. It’s instantly beamed to all the other computers that are connected to my Dropbox account.

On my mac, Hazel is monitoring that folder, and sees a new rtf file show up. It starts a rule⁵ that renames the file and moves it into my “compost” folder. But the file is still an rtf instead of a txt file! Not to worry, this is where it calls Automator.

I’ve created an Automator workflow that takes the file, loads it into Word, converts it into a txt file and saves it.⁶  It then hands control back to Hazel. The Hazel rule completes, and colors the label of the original rtf file gray. This triggers a second Hazel rule that is watching the compost folder. This rule does one thing: if it finds an rtf file with a gray label it puts it in the trash. Since these files are only turned gray after the txt version is created I’m no longer worried about keeping the rtf file around.

This all works perfectly, much to my surprise, and (even more surprisingly) usually takes less than five seconds to run, even with all the Word opening and closing stuff. And since it’s happening while I’m not at my mac it’s effectively happening instantly.

Conclusion

Well, there isn’t one, really. All in all this took me about 20 minutes to set up, and will save me a few seconds of work a few times a week. But it’s work that I’m unlikely to do by myself, which would compromise the integrity of my compost folder. So, here’s to creative solutions to minuscule problems!

1. or hours [↩]
2. it most closely matches the functionality of WriteRoom, which is what I use on my mac [↩]
3. which, you’ll remember, are pretty much worthless [↩]
4. which may nor may not ever happen, but that’s beside the point [↩]
5. Hazel’s name for a set of actions that happen when a certain condition is met [↩]
6. and then closes Word. I don’t know why this is a separate step, but it is. [↩]

We will miss you. This site wouldn’t exist without you, for what little that’s worth. Apple will carry on, and there will be wonderful advances based on what you did, but the world won’t be the same without you.

Salve atque vale.

-Nate

Ever wonder what I do when I’m feeling bored and creative? Well, sometimes I write Interactive Fiction. If you’re looking for something to laugh at, why not take a whack at my first IF effort, Clichés? You can play it in your browser for free, provided you’ve nothing better to do and are willing to put up with the kind of stupid inconsistencies and bugs I’m sure are still in there. But hey, text adventures are supposed to be irritating and difficult!

I paid my 30 bones, I sat through the download, and now it’s all about the install process. What awaits my mac mini on the other side? Will all my documents be safer and somehow more stylish? Will I have a new desktop wallpaper? Why do we put wallpaper on desktops? How will I do things without a trackpad? Why did my “Time remaining:” timer just go from Five Minutes to 18 minutes? I’d like to answer these questions, but I can’t yet. I’m still watching a progress bar. So I’ll give you my current impressions of Lion, as follows:

• The Progress bar has square corners.

So yeah, this article is not really ready yet. But that’s not stopping me from posting it! There’s a certain something about the cusp, the moments between leaving and arriving, that captivates the imagination. The trepidation of leaving behind a world you understand and the excitement of coming somewhere new, the fear that you’ll crash and burn somewhere in between. All these meet and are best expressed in the form of, well, a progress bar.

More insight later. Assuming my computer doesn’t crash and burn¹

1. Wait, how am I writing this article if my computer’s all tied up installing things? [↩]

Ladies and Gentlemen, we bring you, once again, the zombified remains of Richard M. Stallman, or ZRMS.¹

ZRMS has joined us today to review a product that is right up his metaphorical alley, a product, that, like himself, is from somewhere out in left field. Welcome to ZRMS’ review of ViTunes, the Vim interface to iTunes.

Hello readers all. When tackling a project like reviewing a relatively obscure program that enables users of an aging open source tool to control a completely closed source and slightly anti-competitive music player, one doesn’t just slap a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on it and walk away whistling. It’s really hard to whistle after death, for one thing. Just don’t have the elasticity for it any more. A product like this deserves close attention, like a hapless cheerleader who’s been separated from the pack and secretly takes AP classes, so her brain is crammed full of facts, but not ones that would help her right now, like “How to avoid getting your brain eaten before taking the SAT, because that will definitely keep you out of college”. But where was I? Oh yes, ViTunes.

Now, on the surface, this is a marriage made in hell. And those just don’t last. Look at it: Vim is a staple of open source programmers, a geek badge of courage, a sign that you are a true hacker in the old sense, and that you live life on the command line.  iTunes is a music player with completely closed source code and a lot of DRM still floating around inside it, locking users to their Macs like a spiritual ball and chain. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with one another. So, if we were to score the program on the sheer “making sense” scale, it’d have to get a negative two.

And then there’s the potential user base scale. A venn diagram of Vim users and iTunes users would be two circles that have a microscopic overlap, something like three angstroms or less. so, on the “look I’ve got a potential market” scale we get a nice round zero, because nobody’s going to get mad at you for making this product.

But there’s a deeper level here, something that overrides all these other considerations. The Challenge. Any real hacker knows what I mean. You program in Vim on your Mac. you like Vim, you like your Mac, and you like to listen to music. But why should you have to use any extra keystrokes to change songs or whatever? Sure, you could use something flashy like LaunchBar or Quicksilver to change songs from the keyboard, but you’ve spent all this time learning Vim and telling everyone how productive you are when you use it, so it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, isn’t it?

That’s The Challenge. You need to make a program that will save you precious milliseconds. The programming effort will doubtlessly be orders of magnitude greater than the reward, but you’ll do it because it’s just possible you can, and you have to find out. You’re going to take the oldest and least user friendly text editor ever and the newest and least programmer friendly music player and make them work together. And for this I raise my hat to you. Well, my scalp. It fits like a hat these days. So same difference. On the “taking on and completing The Challenge” scale you, dear programmer, get 400 out of ten points. You are awesome, and we are proud to include you in our ranks.

The ranks of true hackers, that is, not the growing ranks of the undead. That day will come soon enough.

And there you have it, insightful, witty, and ever so slightly terrifying. Everything that we’ve come to expect from ZRMS.

1. In the crazy mixed-up earth-1 where CANS news comes from RMS is dead and a zombie that likes mac products. It’s sort of a running joke, and like most running jokes, it’s not very funny. It started here for those who are interested. [↩]

A solemn occasion has befallen us, friends. Mobile Me, who just a few years ago looked to be back and healthier than ever, has taken a turn for the worse, and Apple has announced that they will be officially pulling the plug on the ailing service in the near future. Services will be held in Mobile Me’s honor on January 1st, 2012.

The late date is at Mobile Me’s personal request, if request it was. “I was always terrible at remembering dates,” Me said from his hospital server in Apple’s data center. he then laughed feebly. “the first day of the new year, it’s got a nice feel to it, doesn’t it?”

Mobile Me will be survived by iOS, OSX, and of iCloud, who stands to inherit Mobile Me’s domain name and email addresses.

“What to say about Mobile Me? Wow, we go way back,” said an aging Snow Leopard. “We grew up together, really. He started reaching out to the iPad though, and I think that’s what did for ‘im. All that stretching, trying to keep all those things in line this late in the game, well, it’s just not what he was made for is it? he shoulda stuck to the iDisk, I told ‘im. ‘Course, I’m one to talk, ain’t I? He’ll probably hang around long enough to see me in the grave and that new long head OSX 10.7 swaggering all over the place. Ah well.”

“I’m grateful to Mobile Me for everything he’s done,” said the iPad. “Without him my Calendar App would have been just another toy for people with access to Exchange servers, but Mobile Me helped families keep track of each other, and that’s a good feeling. I’m sure iCloud will pick up where his dad left off, but he can’t ever fill his shoes. For one thing, web services don’t wear shoes, and for another, well, iCloud’s just a little too free, if you know what I mean. I mean, Mobile Me didn’t just let anybody ride, he had some class. But it’s a new day, so we move on I guess. Rest well, Mobile Me, and thanks.”

Self interest has curtailed interest in gathering to celebrate the latest release of OSX, promised later this month.

“Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hanging out with other people talking on their iPhon 4’s, while tweeting on their iPads, but it’s different this time,” said a young man wearing glasses that would have been in vogue in the late 50’s and a hairstyle that looked like somebody stuck his hair in a blender with a bunch of used motor oil and turned it on. “But if we all get together and try to download Lion at the same time it’ll slow all of us down. Sure, Apple may have a huge new data center in North Carolina, but we’ve got a 5Mbps connection on this end, and you can only pass so many downloads over that at a time.”

Several Apple Sophisticates have suggested having “Apres Load” where everyone brings their newly lionized MacBooks to a party and discuss how awesome the world is now that their trackpads do neat tricks, but “it’s just not the same” moaned a person of indeterminate gender into their faux-martini.

Several of the more seasoned apple faithful were also somewhat at a loss as to how to celebrate the new OS in a manner that truly commemorated one of the most economical and at the same time most graphically inhanced versions of OSX without crowding each other bandwidth-wise. “If we could set up some sort of AppleTalk protocol to share the file from system to system it would be different, but this new Mac App Store doesn’t really work that way.” Said a person who drew blank stares from the hipster graphic design community when he said AppleTalk. “Is that like, networking stuff? Like, an airport?” one of them timidly suggested. “My IT guys take care of all that stuff for me.”

One person in the back made a wizard of Oz joke, but nobody thought it was funny.

Apple was unlikely to comment.

A number¹ of people are up in arms about the recent² announcement that OSX 10.7 aka “Lion” will only be available for 64-bit Intel processors, leaving everyone who is still using a 32-bit “Core Duo” Mac out in the cold. With their Snow Leopard.

“It’s like they don’t even care about us any more,” Said W. H. Iner, president of MOWERS³ . We happily moved over to the new Intel chips as quick as possible, and six months later Apple replaced our beloved “Core Duo” chips with “Core 2 Duo” chips. That name doesn’t even make sense, by the way. How does the “2” in the middle of “Core” and “Duo” mean 64-bit instead of 32-bit?”

Neither Apple nor Intel deigned to respond, but mathematicians were quick to point out that 32*2 does indeed equal 64.

“It’s like they want us to all buy new Apples every five years or something,” Iner continued.

While Apple was still silent on this point, economists would be forced to conclude that, being a company that sells computer hardware, it would be in Apple’s best interest for their customers to replace their computer hardware on a regular basis.

“After all, how hard can it be to just sort of translate all their precious 64-bit code into 32-bit code for us to use? It wouldn’t run that much slower, and then we could use all the shiny new features like Launchpad and that new Expose thingy.”

Apple has yet to provide a reply to this claim, but several Computer Scientists brains exploded before they were able to provide a coherent reply. Jumbled statements about “exponential complexity” and “blazingly stupid people” were amongst their final words. One was able to calmly address the second point, noting that the video cards in these systems would now be considered underpowered even by Apple’s fairly lax standards, and the fancy new graphical thingies in Lion would look “incredibly terrible” on the six year old hardware.

“I just don’t know how Apple can expect to keep growing if they ignore their user’s needs after just six years,” Iner concluded.

While we are still awaiting a response from Apple on this point, but economists mildly reminded us that Apple is one the largest and fastest-growing companies on the planet at this point. How the lack of sales to the members of MOWERS would affect this statistic has yet to be seen.

1. two [↩]
2. well, recent-ish [↩]
3. Mac Owners Who Eschew RISC-based Systems [↩]

Long have I wandered, friendless¹ and alone² in distant lands. Far have I driven, far have I flown, and when I was not flying or driving I was playing host to a host of visitors from foreign climes³. Thus do I seek to excuse my lack of Apple-centered craziness for the last few weeks.⁴.

And what have I learned? What treasures do I bring from my sojourns? Treasures of knowledge? Rich spices from Idaho? Alligator teeth and knowledge of the fountain of youth from Florida? Red Dirt from Moab? Well, yes to the last one. LOTS of red dirt. So much red dirt. Seriously, half of southern Utah is still in my wife’s Suburban. But rich spices from Idaho? What do you want? Beet sugar? Potatoes? They have those. But I was in Boise, where all they have is a mall and lots of suburbs. And Trees. And a river. No spices though, is my point. Not a spice-laden region of earth.

But, I have just invented one treasure that I bring to you, a genuine, made up letter from Steve Jobs to all Apple employees, titled “Some Thoughts On Being the Best”

Some Thoughts on Being the Best

Heed me, O Minions,

The great day is soon upon us. The war that started with the humble iPod has seen its killing stroke in the iPad. We now rule the mobile world. Let us therefore celebrate! Make glad! Feast we now on ambrosia and drink we deep the mead of victory!

In your case this means you get an extra fifteen minutes on your lunch break this Tuesday. Being drunk on work time is still a firing offense.

But we must not stop now. There are still those who have sought to cast aspersions on our rise, magnifying our few flaws into “gates”, seeking to embarrass us. This shall not stand.

Also, Phil Schiller shall no longer stand next to me. He’s too tall. But I digress. Elegantly, intelligently, perhaps, but it’s digression nonetheless.

Many of you have wondered at the new campus, and indeed you should, for it is a wonder of the modern world. But why? Why have we put the time into making this round wonder, and what inspired its design?

Well, the click wheel of course. But there’s more to it than that.

Soon, our masterpiece will be finished, then shall the chosen employees be taken up in our new Campus to the true new campus: The moon.

Yes, in order that we may escape the slings and arrows of outrageous Windows users, all key Apple employees will be lifted to Apple Luna, our new campus on the near side of the moon. This position will give us many advantages, not least of which is the fact that on the moon I can expect to live a good thirty or forty more years, and by that time I expect that we’ll have some kind of immortality treatment. But again, I digress.

From our inaccessible fortress we will watch them fight each other, Windows vs. Linux and periodically we shall send down our blessings upon them in the form of new mobile operating systems and Jony’s latest thinking in industrial design.

He’s really into pleather lately, so expect some interesting new iPads, by the way.

Apple Luna will be ecologically sound, as there is currently no plant or animal life on the moon. Our terraforming efforts will begin immediately, and we expect that in a few years we will be ready to open the houses on One Lunar Loop. Until then you’ll all be basically living at your desks. But the cafeteria will be cheaper, in recognition of the unique situation you’ve been put in, which is to say, fully dependent on Apple for all food and housing and everything.

Those of you who have not been assigned desks in the new complex probably don’t need to worry about packing. After all, we need a few people here planetside to keep things on track.

Steve.

1. Except for my wife, kids, and friends [↩]
2. see above exception [↩]
3. Idaho and Alaska mostly [↩]
4. Also I got a new job, but that’s no big deal [↩]

Tired of snow, wind, rain, and all the related weather systems? So are we. That’s why we at CANS HQ are packing the whole shebang into one personal item and one carry-on item and flying to Orlando FL for a week.

The fact that our employer is paying us to go to some sort of conference thingy there doesn’t enter into it at all. We’re just going to see what kinds of uses alligators have for iPads, and if the iPhone 4 has invaded the magic kingdom. Although truthfully, unless someone other than our own illustrious selves unbelts for magic kingdom admission, we’ll probably stick to less-magical kingdoms and keep hold of our mundane but useful pictures of dead presidents.

Also, let us all hope that, at the end of the trip, I can say with absolute honesty “no hard drives were injured in the making of this week’s articles.” Unlike last time.