I find myself posting less than I’d like due to the fact WordPress’s editor is not entirely efficient. I’ve tried it in Safari, Mac Firefox, and IE and am underwhelmed.

I’ve tried posting via email as well, but I can’t easily set tags and Gmail introduces line breaks I don’t like.

So, I’m trying ecto, which seems to be popular with the Mac crowd.

I’ll need an editor for Windows as well. More on that when I get around to it.

I’ve been writing a lot about Mac stuff lately, but the truth is I use Windows as much or more than I use the Mac.

I always own at least one personal Windows machine, and in my professional life I use Windows exclusively.

As I’ve evolved I have less and less tolerance for excess stuff. I reached the point a couple years back where I owned four computers (two running Windows, one running Mac OS, and one running Linux).

I owned all those machines because I wanted to (and still want to) run all the major operating systems. However, I have a decreasing tolerance for the clutter. Computers take up too much space.

As a start I’ve migrated my Mac and Windows machines to laptops, which at least are compact. My Linux computer is still a desktop, though it’s a small OptiPlex I can run headless (thanks, VNC), so at least I don’t have to look at it every day. (For the record, I tried to replace my Windows machine by running Virtual PC on my PowerBook. It’s useful in a pinch, but it’s not a replacement for a real Windows computer.)

So nowadays I still have three machines (actually four, but my Windows desktop is going to my aunt and uncle soon). I’d like to reduce those three to two as quickly as possible.

I really like my PowerBook and have no love for my Dell Latitude D610, so I’m hoping the Intel Macs will be my solution.

There are a lot of discussions happening surrounding running Windows on the new Macs (and running the Mac OS on non-Apple Intel machines). The discussions are centered both on dual-booting, which I don’t want to do (I’ve done it and it’s a pain) and running some sort of emulator.

On the emulation front I was happy to see on MacWindows there are at least two developers talking about this: iEmulator and Microsoft (VirtualPC).

The difference between the current emulation scenario the potential new emulation scheme is the elimination of the PowerPC-to-Intel translation overhead. So, in the new world VirtualPC or another emulator should hypothetically run at near-native speeds.

So, it sounds like in the near future I might be able to run both Mac and Windows at native (or near-native) speeds, on the same sweet Apple laptop (albeit one with a lot of RAM), simultaneously. I wouldn’t have to reboot to change operating systems.

I’m crossing my fingers.

I’ve been getting mail messages from WordPress telling me it can’t
access my mail blog posts.

If this message shows up, the problem is resolved.

I made another visit to the Apple Store SOHO tonight. The purpose of this trip was to pick up a copy of the new iLife, a completely unnecessary purchase I nonetheless made for the third year in a row.

Why did I buy the software? Because I use iPhoto quite a bit and I’d hate to think there could be some really cool feature I don’t have, regardless of whether or not it’s useful. Is it worth $79.99 plus tax? Ask someone else. I can live with myself.

So I bought the software and I’m sitting at Starbucks waiting for it to install. It takes over 5 GB of drive space (that’s after I unchecked some of the extraneous GarageBand content) and about 30 minutes to install, so I’m passing the time with this blog post.

Like I said, the only iApp I use with any amount of regularity is iPhoto. Walt Mossberg isn’t kidding when he says there’s no comparable photo manager on Windows, though I recently set up my Mom with the (free) Photoshop Album and thought it was at least a step forward for Windows. The searching functionality is already sweet (both within iPhoto and via Spotlight), and the new “photo podcasting” functionality that uses RSS sounds intriguing. I’m going to experiment with it on this blog as I begin posting more photos. I’ll be evaluating it against the FAlbum/Flickr combination, which is set up but is in the process of getting some tweaking.

iMovie is an impressive app, but once I’d spent more than about 20 hours on digital video projects I decided my time would be better spent on a pseudo-pro tool, so I moved to Final Cut Express about 18 months back.

Final Cut Express is great. Strangely, I’ve been disciplined enough not to upgrade to the HD version, because there doesn’t seem to be any compelling (or usable—I don’t have an HD camcorder) new features.

Digital video is something else I’d like to experiment with on this blog, but for me it’s really a solution in search of a problem at this point. I’ll probably put out some test video posts in the reasonably near future, though, some done via the iMovie video podcasting functionality (which I assume means the posts will be in QuickTime format) and some using Flash video. Flash video makes more sense to me than QuickTime—I hate video player browser plug-ins.

I’d be really happy if iWeb is a nice, simple, GUI-based Web page editor that will allow me to do simple CSS-based pages from scratch. My own intuition and the brief write-ups I’ve read lead me to believe iWeb will be a template-based app I’ll launch about twice. I don’t think I’m the target market.

The new GarageBand sounds great for anyone who wants to mix their own tunes and/or do podcasts. Good luck to anyone who plans to do this.

(About 30 minutes later…)

iLife ’06 is installed.

Full screen editing and side-by-side photo comparisons (for up to eight pictures) is the nonessential iPhoto feature I’d hate not to have. I’ll post on the photocasting once I have a chance to play with it.

iMovie is much more feature-rich than I remember. Of course, the last version I used was at least two revs back. I can see myself using it for simple video projects, because for basic tasks the UI seems more efficient than FCE’s. I’ll probably post some test video podcasts in the near future.

(Side note: Does iMovie support non-destructive nonlinear editing? If I recall correctly Apple implemented that a version or two back.)

iWeb is pretty much as I expected—pretty, easy to use, and completely useless to me. I can see it being useful for non-techies, though.

No comment on iDVD until I need to build a DVD.

I respect Apple’s strategy. Their tools make Web publishing, photo sharing, podcasting, movie making and other digital lifestyle essentials a piece of cake. The slick tools tie people to the Mac OS and reward people for bringing friends and family to the platform, and .Mac subscriptions provide for a nice recurring revenue stream.

I wish the slick tools were more useful to me personally, but if I were in Apple’s shoes I probably wouldn’t cater to my picky technical preferences, either.

I haven’t launched GarageBand. Happy audio podcasting, other people.

Is this why Apple’s announcements this week were somehow underwhelming?

It’s an Apple rumor, so take it with a grain of salt.

An interesting video from Tony Blair’s crew on Google Video.

A little dry, but neat to watch.

I don’t think anyone was particularly shocked to see Apple announce Intel-based Macs today. Still, it’s pretty exciting. I’ve now experienced two Mac processor transitions.

Apple released the MacBook Pro, which is essentially a slightly thinner, substantially faster, and significantly more feature-rich 15″ PowerBook. Building an iSight into a thinner case is a very cool thing, and the 4x (claimed) performance improvement sounds enticing, though it’s less impressive when you consider how much Apple needs to make up for lost time.

I was kind of hoping for a new case design, but then again I really like the current one, and Apple has made some solid updates to it over time. Also, keeping the basic case design intact means my 18-month old 17″ G4 PowerBook still seems fresh, which reduces the likelihood I’ll start looking to upgrade before the need really arises.

The Intel-based iMac looks cool too, of course, though the relative performance increase isn’t as great. Feature-wise it appears identical to the recent G5 refresh.

It will be interesting to see the benchmarks for both the universal binaries and the emulated apps.

Apple had a good day, and the year’s off to a good start, but I’m a bit underwhelmed given the inflated expectations set by the overactive rumor mill. I should know better. Still, it will undoubtely be an interesting couple years for the Mac platform. Once we’re past the basic transition the innovation should start to get really compelling.

Of course, there’s also finally a Windows upgrade coming later in the year. Yeah, this year will be fun.

I’ve now spent over two hours at the SOHO Apple Store. I came to attend their “Digital Photography with Adobe Photoshop CS Pro” workshop (the seminar actually covers CS2).

The seminar was somewhat useful if you haven’t used Photoshop much, but it didn’t cover anything I wasn’t at least moderately familiar with having read the first few chapters of Deke McClelland’s Adobe Photoshop CS2 One-on-One. Still, if you’re new to Photoshop or are trying to figure out if you want to drop $500-plus on it the seminar is free and is worth an hour of your time.

My attention went in and out due to the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi. I browsed the Web through the next seminar, which was about Aperture. As cool as Aperture looks (Apple’s stuff always looks cool), I thought this week’s Yahoo! Go and Google Video announcements were much more interesting.

The above is not an apples-to-apples comparison, obviously, but I’m much more interested in “network-level” innovation than I am in yet another desktop app. I’m much more interested in Flickr than I am in Aperture, Photoshop Album, iPhoto, or any of the like. The cool thing is that via the Flickr API you can integrate Flickr with any of these apps. I hope Apple does some of this type of integration proactively to keep the desktop apps relevant. As much as I like iPhoto, my Mac isn’t the only computer I use, and Apple online services aren’t the only ones I use, either.

This isn’t to say Apple doesn’t innovate outside of consumer electronics or the desktop, though they don’t do any services that personally interest me. (I use the iTunes music store, but I don’t even have an iPod. That’s a story for another day.) Apple obviously deserves points for iTunes’ impact, but I’d like to seem them do something that has a larger scale impact.

It will be interesting to see what Apple produces at Macworld SF this week. I hope to see at least 1) some sort of Intel Mac Media Center and 2) a compelling new network service, something as interesting the VOD service that’s been rumored.

Okay, I just looked up and I’m apparently halfway through “iPod and iTunes Workshop.” I’m outta here.

I updated the UI to “Version 2.0.”

The major changes:

1) The right sidebar is now in a solid box. There was formerly a dotted line separating the main content from the sidebar. I think this look is a little cleaner.

2) The dotted lines in the header and footer are now solid.

3) The post metadata (the text below the posts) is now a consistent size, regardless of where it’s being shown, and there is now a dotted line above and below the text.

4) The blue link color has been changed subtly. It’s not exactly the same as the lines and the header logo, but it blends better.

One nice side effect of the change is the site looks much better in IE. The look is now consistent in Firefox (Mac 1.5), Safari (2.0.2), and IE (Windows 6.0). I’ve been doing my development on the Mac lately and was surprised to see Safari and Firefox handle things almost identically, while IE tends to go its own way on some things. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; now that I think about it IE always did seem to go its own way on standards compliance.

I’m going to try and stop focusing on the UI for a while. (I know the UI is really plain, but it took a while.) My next area of focus will be Flickr integration. First I’ll fix the general display to make it more consistent with this new UI. After that I’d like to explore integrating the posts and Flickr photo albums using common tags. More on this later.

Not much of an enhancement today. Basically I got yesterday’s
enhancement working and put some automation in place.

Kinda busy this week. I also ran 12 miles over the last two days.

I’m planning to work on the UI this weekend.