Crazy Apple News Site

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. [↩]

Today we thought we’d do an in-depth, hard hitting review of the Mac App Store, Apple’s newest way to cash in on developers distribute software. But then we remembered we write  a humor blog, not one of those Gawker monstrosities. So instead we’re just going to make fun of it.¹

(App) Store? Huh. What is it good for?

The easy answer of course is “absolutely nothing”. But the problem with the path of “the easy answer” is twofold: first, it curtails actual thought, instead lulling us to sleep with its facile nature. Also, it makes for really short articles.

True, at first glance, the App Store doesn’t seem to add a lot to the end user’s experience. It gives you automatic updating…kind of. It’s automatic in the sense of “you get notified that there are updates every time you open the App Store, then you have to download them by yourself” instead of the sense of “happens, you know, automatically”. True, the Sparkle framework handles this much easier² and prompts you to update when you open the actual app, instead of the App Store, but that’s not the point. The point is that now the user, any user, can find a wealth of apps all in one place, without mucking about on the dirty messy scary internet. So that’s a benefit to the user.

Well, it would be, except the majority of the apps on the App Store are, well, terrible. Sure, you’ve got all the good ones, Like Scrivener, Mars Edit³ All of Apple’s awesome software, The Omni group’s usual offerings, etc. etc.

But these are well-established players in the game of Mac Software. For the most part they’re in the store just because it’s easy, and it’s more-or-less free advertising⁴ and a pretty high chance that they’ll be a featured app, and that just can’t be bad. But what about the stuff that’s never been available anywhere but the App Store? Are there any real standout players that are just getting into the game, and are getting into it via the shiny new Apple-sanctioned distribution channel?

Nope.

Sure, we’ve got a lot of iPad apps coming “Back to the Mac”. Apparently the refactor from magical touch-screen device to revolutionary and finely tuned desktop computer isn’t that difficult, and there are all kinds of Angry Birds on the mac now.⁵ But what about the rest of the store? Well, it’s…the kind of thing we’ve come to expect on the iOS app store. A tiny little app that costs you $.99 and lets you track your weight is acceptable on a phone, but it just looks stupid on a desktop. So what happened? Why aren’t we getting the kind of buy-in to the Mac App Store that made the iOS App Store such a huge deal and spawned a thousand copycats? Let’s look at it from the software creator’s point of view.

A Day in the Life of a Developer

So there you are, a fervent Apple fan boy or girl who has the best possible idea for a new app: the Kittenizer. Soon people worldwide will be posting pictures made better by the artistic and subtle addition of giant Impact-font additions to their images, all drawn from their Twitter and Facebook feeds. The muse grips you, and you must get your program out to the world. But how?

Well, who’s your audience? If you want to write in a cross-platform language, like Java or Flex, then you’re locked out of the Mac App Store. No big deal, you’ll write a Windows version later.

So, that means you’re learning Cocoa and Objective-C. Cool. So you start writing your app, and genius that you are, you have it ready to go in less than eight hours.⁶ Your beta testers⁷ all rave about the app, and it hasn’t had a major crash in minutes. So now you’re off to the races! Let’s get that App in the App Store and out where everyone can know the joy of your buzzword-powered masterpiece.

Not so fast! First you need to cough up $99. Just like the iOS Store, there’s a bar that says “you must be this well off to ride this ride” before you get into the Magic Kingdom. So you go to your beta testers and some other friends and scrape together the money, pay Apple, and make your way through their steps to get your product out there. And after you submit your app, you sit back, looking forward to the moment when your app goes on sale, when you’re getting rewarded for your brilliance. How knows, maybe you’ll even end up as a featured app, or maybe you’ll get a huge award at next year’s WWDC! Maybe your app will even get–

Rejected.

What? Why? You scan the email, and, it’s insanely vague. Don’t worry, young one, you’re not alone. Still undeterred, you spend a few minutes getting Sparkle built into your app⁸ and a few hours setting up a system that handles activations and whatnot. Finally, just before midnight the Kittenizer is up and for sale on your own personal website.

In the End…

It looks like we’re really really down on the Mac App Store. And while we don’t think it’s the best idea in the world, it’s not entirely terrible. But a platform that’s antagonistic to both the developer and the customer is a platform that could use some more love and attention, or else it’s going to end up like the Zune Marketplace, and nobody wants that.

1. Which may or may not involve hitting things hard. [↩]
2. and doesn’t cost the developer 30% of their sale price [↩]
3. which I would be using to write this post if I could afford a license. [↩]
4. App Store costs aren’t much higher than maintaining your own distribution channel or using other third parties, and are much lower than selling software the old fashioned way, with discs and boxes and stuff. Look, let’s not get into this here, okay? [↩]
5. Angry Birds just looks stupid on a 23” screen, by the way [↩]
6. I called this section “A Day in the Life” and I mean to stick to it. Even if it means becoming really really implausible in the process. [↩]
7. your mom, your sister, and your sister’s boyfriend [↩]
8. it doesn’t require any code changes, it lives in Interface Builder [↩]

(Since iPhone 4 fever is still going–albeit waning– we are pleased to bring you a newly unearthed journal written by Liliburn H. Jobs shortly after he settled in what was to become Cupertino. Only a few entries are still legible; the journal was found in a box tangled in the roots of a tree.)

March 21st, 1864: I was right! The tree in our north pasture is indeed an apple tree. Lisa and I have a new wager: I say it’s a Macintosh, she says Golden Delicious. We shall see. Our house construction comes along well, although we continue to await our shipment from the glazier.

August 4th, 1864: Lisa owes me again! That tree is indeed a Macintosh. When I took my first bite of it’s fruit, it was like a great, solemn chime rang out, sonorous and simple. I have named this tree “Apple 2″ because Lisa lost two bets to me on this tree. We still await our shipment from Washington. Our house is nearly finished, but still a bit drafty.

October 12th, 1864: at long last our windows arrived from Redmond. We installed them into their frames, but are not pleased with the results. EAch of the four panes has a different tint, one blue, one green, one yellow, one red. In addition, there have been a number of holes that we have had to patch, and a number of bugs seem to sneak through the frame. It is a wonder to me that these windows are so popular. I’ve half a mind to go into business competing with these know-nothings from the north, but I fear it may be too late to make significant headway in that market. I’ve got to think different.

Martyn Williams, who surely had better things to do, chose instead to write about the downfall of tr.im, a nearly unknown url shortener, who sought to compete with the equally stupid sounding bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and the almost-longer-than-the-original readthisurl.com. And we here at CANS are glad he did, as we were all set to launch into the beta testing phase of our own url shortening website.  We had already run into a few snags with our program, not the least of which was the fact that our “shortened” urls were promising to look something like “http://crazyapplenews.com/shortening/index.php/sle4231xfSEslkeyggiotr78Cvdew” ¹

We will now observe a minute of silence for the fallen tr.im, shortened to three seconds, as they would have wanted it. 

Thank you.

1. I was going to actually make that link live, but decided at the last moment not to do three hours of coding and testing for a one-line throw away gag [↩]

With the release of the newest versions of the iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac mini lines, the Mac mini has been changed from an underpowered, “me too” system into a much more powerful “me too” system. Sporting a brand new NVIDIA chipset and up to 4 GB of RAM, the mini is now actually useful. We went to our local Apple Store to interview the mini and see how it likes its new styles.
“Oh yeah. Check this out, iPhone. They came to talk to me, pal. No new story about you this week, huh? Gee, that’s too bad. Looks like mini’s getting all the attention these days! Anyway, what was your question?” We asked again how the mini was enjoying its new chipset, but it was distracted by someone looking at the Mac Pro on display next to it.

“Why are you looking at Behemoth over there? Are you suddenly Pixar employees? Do you really need 40 pounds of aluminum to send your little forwarded emails? Or maybe you think you’re gonna write the next great rock opera. Guess what? I can run Garage Band just as well as The Obelisk over there, and you can carry me home on your lap, instead of using a forklift to get Gigantor over there through the front door. Come on, step away from the monster machine.”

“It’s hard for Apple products to not be the ‘top of the line’,” said iPod Touch. “Mini’s been a weak link in the desktop lineup for a long time, and Pro has definitely let mini know where he stands. iMac? Oh no, she’s always been nice to mini, and he really looks up to her. I mean, we all do. But now that mini has a lot more power and has gotten center stage for the first time since his introduction, well, it’s kinda gone to his processor, if you know what I mean.

“But like I was saying, we Apple products are designed to be the best of the best, and when you’re constantly the runner up, it can be hard on your self esteem,” Touch continued. “I’m not proud of this, but when I went Second Generation and got my 32GB option, I kinda let iPhone know about it, you know? I tried to be nice to the Nanos, but it felt good to put iPhone in his place.” Here Touch broke off, seeing an iPod Classic walk by. “Hey, Classic! How’s your dinosaur hard drive holding up? Don’t scratch your disk! Okay, pal, you just keep running in circles, I’ll be over here surfing the web. Yeah, who’s the ‘funnest iPod ever’ now? Yeah, you just keep walking.”

“We’re all very proud of how far mini has come,” said iMac. “but he has kind of gotten above himself with this new upgrade. I mean, he keeps digging at Pro, asking him ‘how many watts he’s wasted today’ and ‘if he’s made any motion pictures yet’, and basically just attacking him in all his most sensitive areas. We all hope it’s just a phase, and that he’ll grow out of it and start acting like an Apple product again.”

Since we were getting strange looks talking to computers, we decided to talk to a real human being. Unfortunately all we could find was an Apple Store employee.¹

“We think that mini has had a pretty bad case of “Napoleon Syndrome” for a while. He’s small, but quite powerful, and threatened by the bigger and more powerful macs around him. But this new speed upgrade has made it much worse. I don’t know why he picks on Pro so much. I mean, it’s 8 cores to 2, man. Game over. But he just can’t let it rest. Still, it’s better than when he was next to iMac.”

“Hey, blogger guy!” mini yelled. “Why are you talking to crew-cut there? Listen, come here.” Dropping to a whisper as we approached, he continued, “Listen, see if you can convince iMac to come over to my subnet. She is one fine piece of industrial design, let me tell you.”

And so, creeped out and a little disappointed, we left the Apple store, without spending money.² Will the mini grow up and take his place in society? Only time will tell.

1. Rim Shot [↩]
2. which creeped out and disappointed the Apple store staff. [↩]

Today we here at CANS are happy to welcome Frasier Crane, fictional doctor and food snob onto the blog!

Many is the time that I have been preparing for a discrete little soiree in my apartment and have discovered to my horror that I have neglected to adequately explore the full range of cheeses before leaving the apartment, and must choose a cheese based only on my memory of the qualities thereof. This is quite a quandary. Do I purchase the rather nice Lingot Saint Bousquet d Orb that has only recently been made available and hope that it goes well with Bourgogne Chardonnay, or do I purchase the Pitchounet in the belief that it is a more suitable match? Naturally, this usually leads to unlikely goings-on, and more than once has resulted in my randy producer becoming amorously involved with a purveyor of wines and spirits. I’m beginning to think that she could use some therapy herself.

Thus you can imagine my delight when I discovered fromage, a small, inexpensive program for the iPhone that allows me to peruse the world’s finest in curdled milk while out shopping, and ensures that my purchase of Cendré du Beauzac will not fight with the Côtes d’Auvergne that I’ve had laid up for a few years now to truly impress he head of the Arts Council at the beginning of the 2009 season. For only three dollars I can be assured that my choices are the height of taste and sophistication. Unless my improbably-skinny brother “accidentally” erases the program and replaces it with a highly inaccurate parody thereof…

Since it worked so well for my most formidable predecessor, all I’m putting in this post is a link to a post I wrote about Delicious Library on my other site. It’s not as big as Macworld, but hey, I’ve got about 10 dedicated readers on that site! And some T-shirts for sale!

That article started out as a post for this site, but isn’t very funny. Please, no comments about this site not being very funny either.

Leap, the new finder replacement by Ironic software, advertises itself as “better than the finder” at locating both the documents you were looking for and the documents that you didn’t know you were looking for.  However, further testing has proven that Leap is better at locating documents than the actual human brain, and has therefore made the user as useless as an embarrassing vestigial tail.

“With Leap, I no longer need to use my computer,” said tehCatz66 in an online review.  ”All my documents are so easily found, I just think about them and I’m done! Thanks, Ironic Software!”  This is thanks to Ironic’s use of Bluetooth, Bonjour, and Voodoo. 

With Leap you find things based on your natural memory of that file.

says the Leap website.  Macs with wireless connections can automatically connect to your brain, then pull your memories directly from your brain, thus allowing Leap to both index your brain and know what you are looking for, both consciously, as well as subconsciously in the new beta version of Leap 2.0.  ”I won’t say there haven’t been embarrassing situations with the whole ‘subconscious search’ feature,” said Ted Leckie, one of the members of the Ironic team. ”There have.  Like that time that we were demoing the product and this girl with an iPhone walked by.  Leap was searching all the customer’s minds at the time, and suddenly the screen was full of really, really shocking images. Pure lust, in it’s most graphic form.  I mean, it’s just an iPhone!  I’ve got, like, three that I purchased with the proceeds off of Yep.  Don’t tell Tom, by the way. I told him Yep tanked.”

Perhaps the most powerful feature of Leap is the way it can 

…allow you to stumble upon not only the file you were looking for but sometimes an even better one that you weren’t looking for. 

“It’s totally true,” said another user, whose name I haven’t made up yet.  ”I was looking for my will, which I keep as a Pages document, and I found a letter my wife had written to my best friend.  I thought they hated each other, but  now I know that they’re, like, really good friends! Now I can have him over for poker on Wednesdays again! Thanks, Leap!”

Leap is available for only $59 from Ironic software, or if you have overclocked your Time Machine you can go back a couple of weeks and get it as part of the MUPromo Bundle.