Interface design and IT commentary

1. Panic - makers of the highly acclaimed FTP client Transmit, and all-round web creation suite Coda. They have some free stuff.
2. SmileOnMyMac - they have a couple of brilliant utilities, my personal favourite being TextExpander. Also recommend looking into BrowseBack.
3. Ambrosia - search utility iSeek for quick access to popular general or topical search engines (e.g. Google or IMDB), and deep system software for video and audio capture, and arbitrary iPhone ringtone upload.
4. Rogue Amoeba - more and similar deep system software, including stuff for audiocasting wirelessly or to the web.
5. DEVONtechnologies - sell a suite of software that includes a desktop web search engine (it uses your CPU rather than Google’s and gives slightly different results), an application that combines bookmarking, PDF management software, and general file management in one interface (called DEVONthink), and a note taking application. I haven’t been able to make up my mind over whether I’d profit from using any of their software, but their search utility is good when you need more results than Google provides (but it’s not better than Google, it just returns a different set). Also haven’t been able to verify for myself that they have useful artificial intelligence in their software - which they claim. They have freebies.
6. Unsanity - makers of the well-known ShapeShifter application. Many of their applications are concerned with bringing back useful features from Mac OS 9. There’s some free stuff as well.
7. Freeverse - quite a ragbag of applications, including several applications for diverse graphics and audio creation tasks, as well as the free “Think!” - a window-shading app. You’ll also find a whole bunch of Mac games on their site which are quite entertaining.

This is an update to an older post of mine. I was curious whether I would still fork out for the same things that I said I would a year ago - and whether I’d actually have bought any of them. NetNewsWire, which I bought before making the first post, is now free, so we can scratch that off the list. Other than that, the list remains pretty much as was

1. Text Expander - this is very, very likely to be my next buy, even though it does mess with the paste buffer. I got Typinator in one of my bundles, and I’m not even going to set it up, because I know it doesn’t do cursor position, so it loses out in the coding department, especially.
2. Little Snitch - haven’t bought yet, but it’s a wicked utility indeed.
3. Path Finder - still thinking about buying this.
4. Parallels Desktop - still the best way to run Windows - even, by the looks of it, beyond VMware Fusion 2.0. Parallels still has the most seamless file integration, something so far overlooked by Fusion, which relies on shared folders that you have to specifically set up. So you’re always shuffling files around. Not good. Parallels FTW. And yes, I bought it as part of the mupromo bundle (about which otherwise, the less said, the better).
5. CSSEdit - elegance incarnate. This was sitting on the substitution bench at my last commenting, but I bought it as part of MacHeist. Still loving it as ever.
6. Mathematica - haven’t bought yet. Still a possibility.
7. Transmit - I now think that I will end up buying this eventually. One of those really powerful and still usable apps for the Mac, every bit like Path Finder.
8. Delicious Library - What a gem, except I don’t have a camera, may not buy one soon, and I’m not convinced that version 2.0 is so much better than the original. I might give it a spin, though. Maybe there is a way to downgrade if necessary.

And if I ever got serious about web design, I would add the following:

1. SubEthaEdit - still looks good, but getting pushed further down the list. Is now getting competition from several open source efforts, but seems to still be the best of breed in spite of everything. For one, it has syntax highlighting for every language with a shaking stick attached.
   
2. Coda - I think this would be a good investment if I got serious about web dev. Not likely to happen right now.

On a further note, I’m still looking for a tabbed, syntax-highlighting text editor that recovers an entire crashed session (not like Vim, where you have to remember which files you were working on to have them re-open). Also, Cocoa would be nice. I was working with Smultron for a bit, but I’ll have to ditch it because it kills my files when it/the OS crashes (yes, surprisingly, Tiger does crash - I’m sure Leopard does, too). I’m also beginning to think that BrowseBack is kind of a neat idea.

It’s now clear to me that with our capacity to distribute large works of art, such as books, music, and films, to global audiences of millions, and many computer programmers’ opposition to paying for digital goods (resulting in quick breaking of any digital rights management system yet deployed), that we will have a re-emergence of patrons who will support artists for recording albums, writing books, and making films. It is also possible that these patrons will be corporate bodies rather than individual persons, especially in the early days of this cultural trend. Once audiences have become fully accustomed to TV and online ads, such sponsorship will be the best way to reach audiences disenfranchised from traditional media, whose advertising already communicates little about the product and services portrayed, and instead tries to appeal to emotions, which can be seen as deceptive. Additionally, it is clear that many corporations are wealthy enough to pay for high quality works of art and may prefer this opportunity to not be limited to the typical duration of a TV ad. Agencies that put corporations in touch with promising artists stand to make good margins, and will be a desirable employer. Most of the actual trade will be carried out online. As an example of this trend, I would cite the TED conference.

Addendum, same day: I also think it’s likely that this will raise the quality of pop culture, as patrons with economic interests won’t want to be associated with mediocre contributions. More education and genuinely witty entertainment, less l’art pour l’art.

Bear with me for a few seconds more. I’m the first person to see shortcomings in the MacBook Air, and I was disappointed with Apple’s MacWorld announcements in general, BUT their backup concept is beautiful, and finally coming together. Time Machine was included in Mac OS X Leopard, and initially looked like a bit of a gimmick. The 3D representation for time going backwards is of course well known and established in many academic fields. Nothing new there. However, further research reveals (and their marketing material won’t satisfy here) that backup is incremental, that is, it focuses on the files that have actually changed. And now it seems you can use your laptop anywhere in your home and send files to the imo very reasonably priced $299 or $499 Time Capsule (essentially a network drive). The maximum data rate based on the 802.11n specification used, would seem to be 31MB/s, with a range of about 70m through walls (using SI units, m=metres). It remains to be seen exactly how seamlessly Time Capsule integrates with Time Machine and multiple user accounts on multiple computers. It also remains to be seen whether connecting a 1TB drive externally is seamless and, once connected, invisible to the Time Machine user. I have a suspicion that although using hubs, you can in principle connect up to 128 (iirc) devices through a single USB port, Time Capsule may not support this at the data rate one would hope for. On the other hand, I would be quite upset having to buy multiple Time Capsules and not know which one holds the data I want. Certainly, a recent software update re-enabled Time Machine backups to USB drives connected to an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule. It’s not clear what market Apple envisages for the device, because 1TB is not enough for people who seriously work with video, so the eligibility of Time Capsule for that market will crucially depend on whether several devices can be connected by USB, and whether the device keeps performing well under such conditions.

I recently witnessed discussions of new keyboards that provide no tactile feedback, and are potentially rough on the finger joints. Keyboards of this kind have been proposed, and in some cases, manufactured, for some time, but there is no doubt that even Apple with its former focus on usability, is now succumbing to making the slimmest devices they can, no matter the cost to ergonomics. In essence, the keyboard is slowly walking out the door, in spite of previous predictions that most input into computers would remain keyboard-driven for the next ten to fifteen years. What are the alternatives?

The obvious answer is, speech to text, but while add-on packages for medical terms or for various other industries are available for some speech to text systems, I’ve yet to see programs being written by STT. My main gripe here is that many computer languages contain characters that are difficult to dictate because their pronunciation is not unique, and one or two words need to be said to dictate just one character (e.g. “semi-colon” or “open parentheses”). Granted, verbal shortcuts could be used in some cases, e.g. “O P” for “open parentheses”.

Nonetheless, I am left wondering whether among the myriad programming languages, many of whom are very similar to each other, those that do not require characters other than alphabetic and numerical ones (except for containing strings, which may be a harder problem otherwise) will fare better than those that have copious amounts, such as Perl, where every variable name is prefixed with a punctuation character of some sort, or sometimes two, and every instruction needs to be followed with a semi-colon (usually at the end of a line). Being “white-space agnostic” comes at a price.

There are other areas where STT may have difficulty making inroads, including customer service, where the ability of the human operator to speak to the customer is more important than obsoleting the keyboard. It’s possible to imagine a STT enabled software that listens in to the conversation and takes down customer data autonomously. Such a system would need to have a tiny error rate, however.

And it’s still unclear to me whether:

1. people could be equally productive using STT as they can using keyboards, especially programmers;
2. you could use your voice as continuously through the day as you can with a keyboard; and
3. people who have been using keyboards for a long time can be retrained to now use STT.

So I think there’s a lot of work remaining to be done before STT can be widely used, and I’ll personally be using proper, ergonomic keyboards for some time yet.

We’ve long known that both Adobe Creative Suite 2 and 3 use Opera’s Presto rendering engine, with appropriate royalties going to Adobe. However, Adobe AIR uses WebKit. Is there a browser war brewing at A?

iWork ‘06:

• Keynote 1.12 GB
• Pages 0.85 GB

iWork ‘08 Demo:

• Keynote 280 MB
• Pages 266 MB
• Numbers 136 MB

I’m unsure whether to congratulate Apple or wonder why they delivered bloated binaries in ‘06. At least in iDVD (part of iLife, not iWork), the number of templates available seems to have shrunk through the years.

Update 1, 4 February 2008: I’ve been able to confirm, with some help from #macosx on Freenode (special thanks to jgarbers), that the package sizes for iLife have slightly increased in the same time frame, except for iPhoto, which has halved from 552MB to 227MB, and the installation media, which have also almost halved from about 6.1GB to 3.5GB.

Update 2, same date: In the case of Pages, the decrease in size was because each language originally had separate themes (aka templates), but now they share them, while Keynote seems to have shrunk due to sharing some data between different themes.

Having said much about the state of speech to text on Mac, I should point out this news item in Apple Insider.

There is a widespread myth in the Mac community that Mac OS (yes, not just OS X) has included “speech recognition” for many years. I would argue that through well-publicised Jobs keynotes, in-store lecture theatres, many fansites with documentation, mostly in the form of two-paragraph “tips”, and, more recently, instructional videos on the Apple website, user knowledge of OS X is much better than user knowledge among Windows users. How is it, then, that very few Mac users actually use “speech recognition” (my claim)?

You will find that historically, speech recognition has been synonymous with “speech to text” (which the Wikipedia article still redirects from: speech to text). During the sometimes claimed twenty years that OS X has included “speech recognition”, third party applications such as iListen and ViaVoice for Mac have continued to sell. So is this an anomaly of history, where Mac customers have for years continued to buy third party software for functionality that was actually included in their OS out of the box? No, something perhaps more perfidious. There has been a semantic shift, where “speech recognition” for Mac users has become identical with “Speakable items“, a feature of Mac OS introduced as part of the OS in March 1994, although available from 1993 as a stand-alone program called PlainTalk. Speakable items includes phrases that allow you to navigate windows and certain programs; it also lets you define your own phrases which you can associate, for instance, with Automator scripts. I’ll reiterate again: PlainTalk and Speakable Items are not speech recognition! At best, it might be called phrase recognition, and its 1993 release date is very little to show for “20 years of history”.

Finally, as of this writing, speech to text in Tiger can neither be found in the System Settings, nor in the Services menu. Since it hasn’t been mentioned in any of the keynotes preceding Leopard, I doubt it will suddenly appear. (Remember the “top secret features”? Where are they?) If you wish to prove me wrong and demonstrate that scores of Mac users have been morons to buy third party software that did real speech recognition, and that purported experts have been ignorant, please post a reply!

That failing, I have to conclude that a certain gadget website (to be punished with a non-link) has been quite unfair in its recent comparison of Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista, which ignores Vista’s true speech recognition.

The observant consumer will have realised that many large corporations have voluntarily opted into an informal “charity tax” agreement, in which some of their revenue is channelled into community projects. This includes banks, who typically fund arts and sports, and, especially for local banks, invest in local community projects. Local community outreach is also popular with smaller airlines. Supermarkets donate money to various causes, and research into diseases is a popular cause for technology companies (presumably because medical research requires plenty of hardware, and they get free advertising that way, too, or, if you will, recoup some of their donations through added sales).

Apple likes breast cancer, and Sandisk apparently now promotes Alzheimer’s (they sell memory - I’m sure you can see the logic…) But let’s take another look at those other ones - the banks, the supermarkets. I have a few questions that I think will be interesting to answer:

1. What do they get out of it?
2. How much do they donate, what proportion is this of their revenue and profits, and how can the consumer find out?
3. Where does the money come from?
4. Who decides what is a chariy, and what does this mean?
5. What happens to consumer choice, and does the charity tax constitute unfair bundling of products?

The companies get publicity and a clean image - no matter how much general pollution they put out, their public image could come to be more closely associated with the causes they support. Perhaps this is why a lot of companies have steered clear of supporting environmental charities - keep the consumers’ attention away from any contentious issues if you can.

As Valerie points out in the post cited above, the amount of money given to charities may be negligible, and additional conditions may be imposed in the small print to limit a company’s donations to charity. When companies do clearly state how much money is being donated (for instance, where the charitable activity is to give prize money to someone who has done great charitable things), they do not usually state what proportion of their revenue this constitutes - or of their profits, for that matter (don’t misread this as my saying that money given to charity is profits, which it is not - I’m only interested in how the two compare). This information may or may not be attainable by the consumer, but requires additional effort. For companies that are not publicly listed, it may not be possible to find out. In addition to this, although charities may inform their donors how their money was used, this information, again, may not trickle through to the consumer. (Not to mention that the way charities account for their money is not necessarily representative of how it was really used; it’s the same game as tax money: While governments may say that the road tax was used to improve traffic systems, and the tobacco tax for healthcare, the truth is that it all goes into one big bucket, and *some* of it comes out the other side - assuming that the government isn’t getting deeper into debt!)

Where does the money come from? This one is easy to answer. It comes from the consumer. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, from your blood, sweat and tears! So shouldn’t you have a right to know what happens with it? Or, hold on, shouldn’t you be allowed to decide?

Who decides what is and isn’t a charity anyway? Wikipedia has a good amount of information about this if you’d like to learn about the specifics of any one country. That said, charities usually are intended to be non-profit, for one or several of a given list of purposes (so as to exclude, for instance, terrorist organisations), and need to give an account of their finances. In exchange, they and donations made to them can be exempt from certain taxes. Interestingly, in the UK, charities are often instituted as limited liability corporations. So the main differences between a charity and a commercial entity come down to: charities make no profits, some, most, or all of a charity’s income is not in return for goods and services, and charities do not themselves pay tax, for the most part.

So perhaps there is some legitimacy to the way most charities operate, although the general public probably also expects them to uphold high moral standards, such as not giving companies a halo for petty donations. But just as your supermarket is forced to find a charity to give money to if its main competitor gains market share because consumers approve of it having done so, so charities also compete for donors. And that competition is fierce and apparently doesn’t allow for an ethical stance on haloes - and keep in mind, charities also get free advertising when they go on the Sandisk box or the British European in-flight magazine. And they compete for public attention - your blood, sweat and tears are limited, right?

So given how much of your spending may already be given to charity, do you really feel like donating separately? Do you perhaps feel that you deserve to hang those certificates in your home office, rather than the supermarket’s? Would you rather buy charity-free products, and choose your charities yourself? Perhaps you work in a cosmetics laboratory and get harrassed by animal rights activists. How do you feel about your money going into their pockets? Perhaps you’re a researcher in evolution, and some of your money goes towrds Christian charities that oppose evolution? Or you work on cancer, but your supermarket greatly donates to Alzheimer’s, driving up prices for laboratory supplies you now can’t afford. Perhaps you’re Muslim, and your money goes to Christian schools without your explicit consent. (I don’t want to add fuel to that particular fire, I think if people said fewer bad things to each other, it would be for the better of everyone, but I wanted to include the example…)

Do you feel it’s right that you have to buy Windows to use a current version of Microsoft Office, the quasi-standard in office applications? No? Then maybe you’d rather buy your broom without giving money to artherosclerosis research.

I think I’ve established a sound argument here for a call to not bundle charity expenditure with consumer products and services. What is more interesting is why consumers haven’t complained so far. The main challenge for people who donate to charity is that everybody else is a free rider as far as the donor is concerned. Unless their neighbour has a certificate on his wall, he’s probably benefitting from their money with no return. As we’re gradually coming to understand that there is no reward in the afterlife for those who give to charity, this becomes meaningful. If your charity is tilled at the supermarket, unless you want to shop at smaller independent stores, you can’t really evade this particular tax - you eliminate the free riders. Perhaps this is what motivates people’s giving this power to supermarkets - it’s really malice ultimately: “if I’m to donate, I’ll have everyone else donate as well; that satisfies me.” We’re all in it together, we’re all paying our dues. Just like a good tax should be. But in the midst of all that, we’ve stopped caring who the money goes to.