Crazy Apple News Site

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week we talk about an oldie but a goodie: Dashboard, the venerable container of small HTML-based applications!

Q: So, is Apple finally ready to confess their sins?

A: Oh, no, not one of you…

Q: Finally ready to admit their rank treachery and thieving ways?

A: Look, what happened happened and there’s very little that can be done about it now, so let it drop, and let’s move on!

Q: Want to keep it quiet, eh? Don’t want the people to know about the far superior experience they could have been having, years before Apple decided that they were taking over the market, huh?

A: Look! I don’t want to be rude, but nobody’s sued anyone, and besides, we’re supposed to be answering questions, not arguing about history.

Q: Alright then, here’s my question: How do you use the Calculator widget?

A: Really?

Q: Really.

A: O-Okay, if that’s your question. The Calculator widget is really pretty straightforward. You click on the numbers and the enter button and math happens.

Q: I mean, “How do you use the Calculator widget knowing full well that Apple stole it lock, stock and barrel from Konfabulator?”

A: Yeah, I kinda thought that’s what you meant. Alright, are we going to do this? Are we going to rehash history and stir up the restless ghosts of old Daring Fireball posts? Fine. Have your say.

Q: Thank you. Ahem. KONFABULATOR WAS AWESOME! IT STILL IS! EVEN AS “YAHOO WIDGETS” IT’S STILL MORE AWESOME THAN DASHBOARD BECAUSE YOUR WIDGETS CAN BE ON THE SCREEN ALL THE TIME, AND NOT JUST IN THE “DASHBOARD”! IT’S CROSS-PLATORM! IT’S FREE! YOU SHEEP SHOULD USE IT!

A: All better?

Q: *pant pant* Yes. Thank you.

A: Fine. Now, with that out of the way, did you have any questions about the obviously far inferior Apple Dashboard?

Q: Just one.

A: Really? That’s a surprise. So, what’s your question?

Q: Wer ist Ihr Lieblingskäfer?

A: C’mon. Two can play the “ask dumb questions via the Translator widget.” And the answer is Ringo.

Q: Danke.

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week, we just can’t get enough cuttin’ and pastin’ with the new OS for the iPhone. Or in our case, the iPod Touch. Actually, we’ve been abusing the “shake to shuffle” feature and discovered that “shake to cut and paste”¹ is not nearly as conducive to a good iFAQ as we would have hoped. But here’s what we got. We don’t have time to re-organize it. Gotta go make some in-app purchases.

Q: Shouldn’t that be MMMS?

A: Yeah! The iPhone is totally doing the P-Trans now!

Q: Or maybe I mean paying three times as much for a program as I used to.

A: All the way through, baby!

Q: The user kinda gets it in the shorts.

A: Well, let’s say you’re a big Red Sox fan…

Q: I know, they gave the maps a “turn by turn” feature.

A: Um, use it for good! Not so much for evil!

Q: So, basically….

A: Um, I think you mean amazing programmatic enhancements!

Q: And The G1 could do it at launch! But the iPhone does handle it more elegantly.

A: A text message with a picture in it.

Q: What is MMS?

A: Well, I admit, that one’s kinda more developer-friendly than user-friendly.

Q: Ah, so it’s for thinning out the stupid people, is it?

A: Ummmm, I don’t think that’s what it’s for…

Q: And why should I be happy about that?

A: Gotta love those little blue pins! Oh, and speaking of the blue pin…

Q: Yeah.

A: Well, what about cut and paste? That works well!

Q: Hey, what?

A: …And you subscribe to a push notification service that tells you how the Sox did in any given game!

Q: Huh. That’s pretty green of them.

A: But come on, there’s other new features as well!

Q: Heaven forbid…

A: “Multimedia” has been one word since, like, 1993, so we’re good with it.

Q: Like getting nickeled and dimed to death by programs I purchased previously?

A: Aaaaand you can find routes for walking, car, or public transportation in select metro areas!

Q: Knocking off the folks that follow stupid teams? “Pushing” them off of high ledges?

A: Well, there’s push notifications! They’re like background apps, but waaay more processor-and-battery friendly.

Q: Allright, so what else do you have that isn’t a patch that should have been in the 1.0 or made to make me crazy?

A: It stands for Multimedia Message Service.

Q: Quiet! And then, when they’ve been getting the depressing updates for a month….

A: What?

Q: No, no, I can use this! Just make a program that consistently tells the user that their team is terrible…

A: This could have gone better.

1. Yes, I did actually write a normal iFAQ and then made a little program to randomly put in alternating “Q” and “A” lines. The only one I forced was the final “A” [↩]

With the latest incarnation of Apple’s iPhone OS all up ons, people around the world are finding ways to celebrate the coming of spotlight searches and third party game accessories. From the usual fruit bats who are naming their children things like “1st Gen, 3G, and 3GS” to the more nontraditional fruit bats who are tattooing images of all their iPhones’ backsides on their own backsides, people everywhere are feeling the pull of Apple’s latest and greatest, and preparing to either get it free or pay ten clams, depending on their circumstances.

And it goes without saying that the major cities of the world are hosting launch parties: all night orgies of anticipation; gatherings of the faithful waiting to add the small light of their devotion to the luster of their devotee, seeking solace in one another’s presence, finding safety from the jeers of the uninitiated, and enduring the long watches of the long night together, hoping for a brighter dawn, or at least the ability to shake their iPod Touch to shuffle.

Against our better judgment, we¹ made the trek down to the convention center/hotel lobby where the SLIP-UG² had gathered. The air was thick with Wi-Fi signals and AT&T branded radiation. The Androids could feel it, and it seemed after a while that I could almost see it, the thousands of SMS messages wanting to be MMS messages, the Twitter posts ((the , the direct-to-device downloads, all streaming into and out of the room through the æther like millions of subatomic fireflies, dancing in their particulate waves, coming and going in nearly constant, but incredibly orderly and inexplicably stylish, data transfer by Apple.

At first I was confused that no one approached me directly, indeed, my presence seemed to confuse and slightly annoy the people around me. It wasn’t until I got my iPod Touch onto the free wireless that I was contacted by another person, via my device’s chat client.

“Welcome, Nate’s Touch! I’m Ryan’s iPhone! Glad you could make it!” I looked around. This was some amazing Bonjour trick that I hadn’t expected, and still nobody seemed to be making eye contact, even while they were making iContact.

“Your user is looking for Ryan, I’m guessing. He needn’t bother. Ryan and I are in the building somewhere, but we don’t know where you are, and as long as you’re on the network, that’s good enough. Your user was good to bring you here, but this event is for you, not for the one who carries you around.” This was getting a little weird, but fortunately another joined our somewhat surreal chat.

“Ryan, I told you to stop that. You scare off the newcomers. Hi! I’m guessing your name is Nate. I’m Dan. Welcome to our party! There’s a lot to do, and now that you’re connected you can get in on the action much easier.”
Dan (who showed up in the chat as “Dan’s 3GS“) then sent me a list of activities, ranging from “3.0 programming tips” to “Pimp my iPhone” contests. I noticed that I was too late for the “iPhone and Owner lookalike contest”, but was warmed to see that “iPhones and iPod Touches are both welcome here. We don’t discriminate based on carrier, case material, or processor speed.” The feeling waned a bit when I saw in smaller print, “iPod Classics need not apply.”

I wandered through the crowd, lost and bewildered, connected and yet disconnected, and gradually a feeling stole over me, a realization that warmed me, validated me, and left me giddy and excited, a thought that summarized everything that is the Apple ethos:

“It sure beats the Linux Users Group meetings!”

1. meaning me and a couple of androids; no royal “we” here, Ace [↩]
2. Salt Lake iPhone User’s Group [↩]

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Asked Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week: the launcher that’s still supported, LaunchBar!

Q: What is a LaunchBar? Where astronauts go before…

A: No.

Q: So… Why do I want this thing that isn’t a place to get an upwardly mobile midday meal?

A: Do you run programs on your Mac?

Q: Yes…

A: Do you ever use Spotlight?

Q: Yes. Um…

A: THEN YOU’RE WASTING TIME! LaunchBar is there to allow you to do these things without the huge, vast, excessively wasteful processes you’ve been using since 1942. LaunchBar is better than Finder and Spotlight combined and finding and spotlighting things!

Q: I just switched from a PC like, two years…

A: Let’s face it: the finder can take seconds to get you to the program you want to open, and even when it does, it just sits there.  You need that file open now, dang it!

Q: No, really, that’s okay…

A: And what about your cut and paste operations? You’re probably wasting huge amounts of time laboriously cutting one thing, pasting it somewhere else, cutting the next line, pasting that.  THIS IS BECAUSE YOU ARE STUPID! LaunchBar allows you to do intensely amazing things with your clipboard, without running three extra programs.

Q: I just need to run one extra program, right?

A: LaunchBar isn’t extra, it’s integral. LaunchBar makes you so much more productive that people from other companies will stop by to give you promotions!  With the amazing ClipMerge™ feature, you can (wait for it) merge several clips together into one single clip object, which can then be pasted at will into anything!

Q: Okay, that’s kinda useful, so I could copy text from a few documents…

A: Paste it into your cat! Paste it into a blog! Paste is delicious! ClipMerge™ puts you in command of the paste! You are Lord of the Paste! The PasteMaster! You need it! Launch it now! Use it! Love it! It does math!

Q: Wha? Math? Why…

A: Complex equations are simple! It can handle sines and cosines! You want the sines and cosines? You think you’re ready for the math? You can’t handle the math! You need LaunchBar. You need it now! Buy it!

Editor’s note: We haven’t asked them, but we’re pretty sure that Objective Development, the creators of LaunchBar, would like us to point out that we are in no way affiliated with them at all.  But in all sanity, we really do like their product and use it daily.

So, after three days of insane amounts of work at my other job, we finally make it to WWDC: Why won’t dorks co-operate? and the keynote that we’ve all been waiting for.  For those of you who didn’t sit there for two hours watching the liveblogs, here’s a brief synopsis:

• 13-inch MacBook is now a MacBook Pro. It feels special.
• After ripping on Windows 7 for being Windows Vista 2.0, Apple tries to keep you from noticing that all they did was add the word “Snow” to the preexisting leopard.
• The MacBook Pro line gains SD card slots. “This is the digital card format of the future!” proclaims an excited audience
• It’s revealed that the MacBook lineup is so “green” that they all go out and plant trees when you aren’t using them. PC laptops, for contrast, signal a special machine in Redmond that cuts down a tree every time Windows boots up.
• something called Dock Expose gets touted as the best feature ever ever ever.  It looks kinda complex, but we’re sure that’s just because we don’t yet understand it.
• QuickTime X has a new “creepy techno-eye” icon
• At one point, they claim that Snow Leopard will “blow up your thumbnails”, which sounds like an “enhanced inerrogation” technique to us.
• New motherboards can have 16 billion gigabytes of RAM.  Java apps will still be dog slow, however.
• the new iPhone OS will take the iPhone in a completely new direction: GAMES! Okay, it’s an old direction, but boy did they ever demo the heck out of new games today!
• iPhone OS 3.0 will have features that were included in Android 1.0, Pre 1.0, and for that matter, the OS that runs the Motorola RAZR
• If you lose your phone, Mobile ME will go out and tell you where it is, then tell whoever has it that it’s yours and you want it back please. Also, MM will wipe your phone clean, so they can’t steal your. *ahem* passwords.
• Not one but two feature demos failed. This never would have happened if Steve had been in charge.
• Oh, right, there’s a new iPhone. It’s got a compass. You should buy it.  Also, apparently Apple hired MacHeist to make the commercial for it.

And that’s all folks!  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get some sleep.

Woz Bing Apple Co Founder a “Big Fan” of Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Tech Ticker, Yahoo Finance.

The world was rocked to the core by Steve Wozniak wholeheartedly endorsing Microsoft’s soon-to-be launched new search engine Bing.

“Wow. I’m, totally surprised that the Woz would do such a thing,” said Tim Cook, Acting CEO of Apple. “This is the first time he’s done something so not-Apple and gotten a bunch of publicity from it. Is he still wearing that pink shirt?”

Others were equally shocked. “Woz likes the Microsoft thing, huh? Wow. I’m really  really  (yawn) shocked,” said Phil Schiller. “Of course, Apple doesn’t make a search engine, so it’s not really attacking us is it?  But I’m sure people will sit up and…[several second pause as Phil gets distracted by a YouTube video on his iPhone] what were we talking about? Oh, right, Woz and that Microsoft thing.  Right.  Um… Yep, it sure is a big deal.”

Microsoft hopes that instead of “Googling” things, by 2011 we’ll all be “bing-ing” things.  Unfortunately, like the Palm Pre and the Zune HD, Bing is still something that regular people can’t actually judge for themselves.