New, new, nothing but the new

July 28, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Among the different kinds of discussions following the launch of Mac OS X Lion, one thing I’ve noticed is some people’s attitude towards those who, like me, have manifested perplexity and criticism regarding the latest feline. I have my reasons as to why I still haven’t upgraded to Lion, but being ‘scared’ by the new is not one of them. I actually look forward to installing it and take advantage of some of its most interesting features — Resume and Versions are on top of my list, considering how I work and how I use my main Mac. 

I have to admit, however, that Mac OS X 10.7 feels like one of the most disruptive upgrades since Mac OS X 10.0, or at least since passing from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4). Many applications may not work properly until their developers release updates fixing some Lion-specific issues. Other, older applications built on PowerPC code won’t work at all under Lion, since Rosetta (the piece of software that could make them run on Intel Macs) has been discontinued. Some new features tied with the user interface, like the rethinking of scrollbars and scrolling gestures, or the reorganisation of Spaces and Exposé into Mission Control, seem almost arbitrarily disruptive on Apple’s part.

When Apple introduces something new, or significantly alters old habits, it rarely does so on a whim, and I always try to stop and think about the big picture, about how a particular change may be a clue to a possible direction Apple is taking, and so on. Understanding a change doesn’t always mean agreeing with it unconditionally, or being fine with it just because it is (or feels like) something ‘new’. I do think that Apple is adding too many multi-touch gestures to the trackpad, and that Apple is asking users to learn some that look a bit too contrived (the gesture for launching Launchpad, for example) or confusing (e.g. “When do I swipe with 2, 3, or 4 fingers?” or “I can zoom either by pinching or double-tapping. Are the two gestures completely interchangeable system-wide?”). The Gestures video on Apple’s site illustrates these new gestures and despite the efforts to make things look natural, some of the interaction between what happens on the trackpad and what happens on screen still feels somewhat artificial, at least to me. The interface being mediated may have something to do with it.

I tried these gestures on a Lion-equipped MacBook Air in a store, but few of them came naturally to me, in stark contrast with what happened when I purchased my first iPhone: the direct contact between my ‘input device’ (the finger) and the content created an immediate intuition of how I could manipulate the interface. During my informal test in the store, I found more natural to invoke Mission Control or Launchpad by pressing a key. The corresponding gesture was always something I remembered later, like “Oh yes, I could also achieve this by doing this, etc.”, and always felt like a superfluous burden to learn, like “But why should I do that? I have to move my fingers away from the keyboard to make a gesture that’s longer to perform and just interrupts what I’m doing”.

Another thing I don’t particularly like about Mission Control is how disrupts previous workflows strongly based on the Exposé + Spaces combination. (Thankfully Matt Gemmell has written a post about how to restore some of Snow Leopard’s Spaces behaviour in Lion.) Or how it basically deprives Dashboard of any usefulness, confining it to its own space. One of Dashboard’s strongest points was the ability to appear over your current workspace, so that you could quickly take a look at some of its informative widgets (the weather, network and system stats, etc.) or briefly interact with them without moving away from the workspace. With Lion’s implementation, reaching the Calculator widget is possibly longer than just beginning to type Calc… in Spotlight and invoke the Calculator app itself.

Back to the main topic, sometimes what’s more alarming is not the new per se, but the fundamentalist mentality of some people, for whom new always means better. Since OS X Lion’s launch, I simply have wondered aloud whether certain changes are indeed for the better. Some people seem to think that just because Lion is the shiny new product, it has to be all good and of course it has to be better than previous Mac OS X versions and I’m just an old fart who doesn’t want to adapt to the new — only because I’ve voiced some doubts and because I’m renown by now for my passion for vintage Macs and obsolete(d) technologies. I generally don’t fear the new, and certainly not Lion, but often in the tech world I see lots of ‘redesigns’ and ‘improvements’ that appear to be nothing more than attempts at fixing what wasn’t broken in the first place.

David Kendal on BBEdit 10

July 27, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Software

David Kendal has written a very nice review of the just-released BBEdit 10. As a long-time user of BBEdit myself, I was very interested in his point of view — he uses BBEdit more intensely than me and I trust his good eye for the finer details. He doesn’t disappoint:

[BBEdit’s] decidedly minimal window layout consists of just a toolbar containing a small amount of information and display options; the text area; and a thin bar displaying more document information, such as word count, source language, and encoding.

Once dug into, it can reveal more UI elements as needed, like a sidebar for file browsing. This isn’t there until it’s needed, however, so BBEdit always seems to make excellent use of the available screen space.

BBEdit continues to offer an excellent set of built-in features. Text manipulation tools like hard-wrapping, email-style quote level alteration, automatic commenting/uncommenting of selected text, quote education, tabs-to-spaces conversion (and vice-versa), and many more are built in to the editor as standard — and the ability to write filter scripts makes the addition of further tools simple for those who know any standard Unix scripting language.

I’ve used BBEdit 8.7.2 for a long time and I updated to version 9 not long ago, so when BBEdit 10 was released I wasn’t sure I would update again soon, but both the application price reduction and David’s thoughtful and concise review are definitely driving me into getting it sooner rather than later.

Inkstagram

July 27, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Perhaps you already know about this site, but I think it’s worth mentioning nevertheless. If you want to take a look at your Instagram feed, and maybe favourite a few shots from the people you follow or leave a comment, without leaving the comfort of the big screen of your laptop or desktop computer, you can point your browser to Inkstagram. You authenticate to the site using your Instagram account credential and voilà, here you have this elegant and functional interface. You can even turn it into a standalone application by using tools like Fluid or, if you’re already on Mac OS X Lion, Automator (as Andy Ihnatko explains).

Update 2012 — Roughly at the end of 2011, Inkstagram changed name (nothing else), so you’ll find the service at the new domain Ink361.

Telephone box

July 27, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera
Blow Up

Could you get me Frobershire 3–229, please?

Some time ago, I tweeted:

You may laugh at me, but one thing I miss from the pre-cellphone era is calling people from a public phone booth. That moment of isolation.

Your memories of the telephone box experience may vary (if you’re old enough to have such memories, that is). They depend on the place where you live or used to live, and the general state of such a public, yet very private place. Yes, I remember vandalised phone boxes, or opening one and finding a homeless guy taking a nap, or worse. But I also remember certain beautiful telephone boxes with soundproof doors, rotary dial telephones and even a small shelf with the huge phone directory on it. These phone boxes were usually found inside bars and other public areas containing arrays of them.

But that moment of isolation, when you literally shut out all the city’s noise to just hear the person you were calling, was invaluable. Mobile phones have of course brought a series of conveniences: you can be reached anywhere, and in case of emergency you don’t have to look for a public phone. The flip side of being reachable everywhere is that you can talk everywhere, with the unfortunate post-modern side effect that public places are even noisier than before, because more people shout into their phones and sometimes look like crazed insects while they search a quiet spot or some corner with better reception.

I often overhear bits and pieces of conversations produced in such environment. I know it’s not polite to do so, but the fact is that some people talk so loud it’s impossible not to hear them and this kind of degradation in social education always irks me. The fact that we’ve come to a point that if you hush the shouter, you are looked at as if you were the ill-mannered person is utterly absurd.

When chatting with other people or expressing myself online I sometimes get carried away about ‘the old days’ (well, a couple decades ago, really, I’m not that old!), often others see me as some kind of Luddite, rejecting everything new and the progress in general. Not at all. What I do is criticise certain consequences that progress has brought. Mobile phones and smartphones are a fantastic invention, but have also spawned a series of bad, annoying habits people display in public with too much carelessness and disrespect for my tastes. But when I mention this, I’m the old fogey of course.

The other great Steve

Phone boxes are cool, trust Steve.

Today, telephone boxes are disappearing. The vandals have won, mobile phones (shouters included) have won, and I just stop and think about the irony: we’re leaving behind places that were quieter, phone calls that were clearer (the two persons involved could hear each other better) and cheaper, at least the local ones. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.