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.

According to their website, the Classilla project is in love with the very European, very OS9-friendly iCab browser; a program that has been ready for 1989 for the past five years.

Classilla is designed to bring the modern benefits of Mozilla-based browsers back to people still living in the 90′s, thus freeing them from the terrors that we all lived through in those days.¹

It’s heartwarming to see people following the great ones at Apple and push the boarders backwards as well as forward.  If this trend continues we can look back and see a day where nobody using a Mac will have ever had to utter the words, “I just installed Internet Explorer on my Mac!”

1. That’s right. I’m looking at you, blink tag! And don’t try to shuffle off the page, marquee!  You know what you did.

The first of which was not, “do we make fun of Microsoft for this odd new advertising medium/revenue stream?” Of course we’re going to make fun of them for it.  That’s a given.  No, the question is “how are we going to make fun of Microsoft for this odd new advertising medium/revenue stream?”

I mean, we could take the obvious route: “These t-shirts crash 30% less than Windows Vista! Just like DOS!”

Or the closely related: “And unlike DOS, these shirts are guaranteed to be bug-free!”

Or even: “These shirts are guaranteed to {expletive deleted} destroy Google!”

And we decided to step around the whole “Softwear by Microsoft: celebrating the last time we made an OS that worked the way it was supposed to,” territory.

None of these are the route we decided to take.  No, we have a much higher, more subtle method of mocking the largest, most influential, most myopic software company in the world in mind.

Stay tuned to this RSS feed to see what we did come up with!

And no, we aren’t going to Photoshop Steve Ballmer’s head onto the body of some twenty-year-old model who is wearing one of these shirts.  So just get that image out of your head right now.

For years Firefox on the Mac has been ugly, ugly like a duck covered in oil and thrown off the back of a truck into a pile of herring innards that have been sitting by the side of the road from the toxic-waste-spewing EEA violators.  But now, all is sweetness and light.   Firefox has beautiful cocoa widgets and a new theme that looks so Leopard-y that Safari is kinda jealous.

Safari, meanwhile, is promising that good things are coming “real soon now™ ”, while the ‘Fox is running around the world like a marathon runner with a jet pack.  No, two jet packs, a transporter, and, like, a freakin’ laser cannon.  Rumors of the download site being down all morning on the big day are completely untrue and were made up by Hillary Clinton to ruin Firefox’s reputation.  Firefox is awesome.

Out-positive that, Walt Mossberg.

“It was for his own good, really,” remarked Eric S. Raymond.  ”He was getting, well, rabid is the only way to describe it.  I mean, some of the things he wanted to put into GPL 3.0 were just strange. I won’t get into specifics, but where would we even find a kangaroo suit in Linus Torvalds’ size?”

Raymond assured us that it was done in the most humane way possible. “We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry…  Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard.  Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”  Tears were running openly down his face at this point. “We’ll miss you, big guy.”

In recent months Stallman’s mental stability has weakened, as evidenced by a recent manifesto calling for a change in the name of most operating systems:

In order to underscore the role that GPL’d software plays in our lives, we need to convey to people the idea that the GNU foundation is at the heart of all good software. To this end we need to use the following names:

• All IBM Products will be called “Prison/DOS”
• FreeBSD will be called “GNU/FreeBSD”
• OpenBSD will be called “GNU/OpenBSD”
• No, SERIOUSLY, call it GNU/Linux!  Stop laughing at me!  I mean it!
• OSX has been heavily influenced by free software.  It should be called GNU.5/OSX.  
• Windows will be called “Spawn of Satan”.

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