Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: desktop

  • Calypso

    Calypso

    You’ve heard about it. Calypso, the WordPress desktop editor for Macs. I’ve been using it and I’m going to give you a quick rundown on what I like and what I don’t.

    A screenshot of calpyso, used to write this post.

    Like

    First of all, it’s Open Source, which is great to look at. Anyone can poke at it and play with it. It’s also a nice GUI to use. Markdown works out of the box if you have it set up in Jetpack. That’s awesome since I’ve gotten very used to using it thanks to Jekyll.

    It’s very fast as well, which is great. Fast is good. It also saves rather quickly, even when I’m on some shitty wifi. It’s much faster than using the native WordPress editor.

    There have been some bumps in the road, but the development is open to comments and suggestions and steering. Some of the decsions made make sense from every angle except the end users. Users use things in weird ways and, once explained, development seems willing and able to adjust.

    Dislike

    There’s no spell check. This makes me very sad (I’ve been told it’s a feature request). Clicking back and forth between my sites is a little annoying, and I can’t easily hide sites (or reorder them). There aren’t tabs either, which means I can’t write on three or four posts at once. Yes, I totally do that.

    You can’t do Custom Post Types. Yet. This is a deal breaker for one of my sites. Basically I can’t manage my WordPress eCommerce store with this. You also can’t change color schemes. I somewhat wish that it would pick up my user settings and use the profile color from MP6 that I selected there. That way I’d have purple for some posts, green for others, and I’d always easily know where I was.

    On the Fence

    I don’t really like that it forces me to use Jetpack, but at the same time, the REST API isn’t in core yet, so this makes sense. Similarly, I don’t like that it’s Mac only, but I understand why. Unlike ‘traditional’ software development, the people on the WordPress.com project are primarily Mac users. Of course they went to Mac first. Since it’s open source, I’m hoping someone figures out how to Windows it up soon. Making it Unixy shouldn’t be too hard, since Mac is running Unix.

    Back to Jetpack, I would love to see this forked and decoupled from Jetpack, using the REST API instead. Not because I hate Jetpack (quite the opposite) but because I’d like to set my father up with this, and he travels to China where WordPress.com (and Jetpack) are problematic thanks to the Great Firewall.

    All in All, I Like It

    So far, so good. I like Calpyso and it’s no great effort to remember to use it, unlike pretty much every other desktop app for WordPress. And yes, I’ve tried those.

  • The Redistribution of Apps

    The Redistribution of Apps

    Mac is going virtual. They’ve finally agreed they’re a hardware company (yay) and they’re trying to make it easier to install software. No longer will you go to the store, but you will logon to the App Store and download. Apparently the App Store is already bigger than Best Buy. The big news of the month was iCloud (and iTunes Match), where you can sync your data across multiple devices. Wirelessly. Okay, that is pretty cool. But the announcements didn’t get everything right.

    The concept of mobile redistribution of applications is not a new one, but Apple, as always, is attempting to do it more elegantly than before. At the very least, the ability to sync (for free) my documents among multiple devices at once is worth the price of admission. I like to write on my iPad and my laptop, after all. While iCloud isn’t out to the public yet (Lion, the next OS 10.7, comes out in July, so I would expect iCloud by Christmas), we can speculate on how it will handle the sharing of more than just data.

    Here’s what I think they need to have to make this a winner:

    Torrent-style downloads

    I have two laptops and three iOS devices. That means I have to run upgrades multiple times, and some of these are pretty big. Do you know what happens if your net craps out in the middle of a 200meg download of iOS 4? You get to start over! The new Lion OS is a 4G install, and it’s a disk-less revolution. Great, that means it’s cheaper ($30 vs $130), but that also means I have to download it for each computer I need to upgrade, and I have to pray my net doesn’t blow up in the middle. Which brings me to…

    Backup to Disk

    I know we’re going diskless, and that’s great, but if I legitimately buy a product, I should be able to sneaker-net if I want to. Frankly, it’s going to be faster than downloading if I have to upgrade more than 10 computers. I won’t bottle neck things with 10 concurrent 4G downloads all at once. While you can’t really do that with the iOS stuff, I wish I could use one download for all my iDevices. Of course, with the new idea of AirDrop we could…

    Copy Between Computers

    Why not come up with a way to flag up to 5 computers as your ‘home network’ and, if they’re all on the same IP range, let them share installs? So I download Lion, and then AirDrop it to my other computer. Done! To a degree, it looks like iCloud will be able to do this, but it seems to only be for data. For photos, music, documents, etc that’s great. Those aren’t all of what I do. I write code. What about webpages I work on? I like to have those backed up too. In fact, the best way to do this would be….

    iCloudShare!

    If I have a Time Capsule, why not let me store all my installers there, register my computers on TC, and then have a local repository of my paid for installs, so I can download them at any time? Think of it as having your own personal little cloud where all your stuff is there, and then when you want to re-install, off you go! Mind you, I already know from experience that if I restore from backup between computers, I can copy over all my apps and preferences. With the new iCloud they’re working on this for iOS apps, which is something they certainly can do. Then you can bring in ….

    MyCloud

    The real replacement for MobileMe would be MyCloud. Work with ISPs so you can plug a Time Capsule (now renamed Cloud Maker) into your network hub, and it automatically makes it so you can connect your registered computers no matter where they are. I would restrict full backups to LAN (local area network – i.e. only at home) only, but you can sync docs and whatever else you want no matter where you are (like DropBox, only at home).

    So what do you say, Apple?

  • Surfin’ Safari

    Safari 3 beta came out for Mac and Windows. Naturally I download Safari 3 for Mac last night and test it out, planning to pick it up on Windows when at work.

    On a Macintosh, things are like a pleasing mix of Firefox and Safari. There are a couple bugs I dislike (like Firefox’s ‘Allow Popups from…’), but I adore that it now alerts me ‘Dude! You’re closing multiple tabs!’ if I quit, and ‘Hey, you’re entering text in this window, you sure you want to close it?’ if I close this tab. So on that note, yay.

    On Windows it sucks balls. Oh, it’s fine on my XP home edition, but as soon as you add in Windows wackiness of Roaming Profiles, and proxies, and it dies.

    Mac makes two critical errors:

    1) Not letting you manually adjust proxies. Picking it up from IE seems sensible, but having used IE and multiple other browsers, I can tell you it’s a bad idea. IE settings work for IE. Firefox has to be different, slightly, and so does Safari. So instead, they should default to IE, but allow you edit access.

    2) Preferences don’t grok roaming profiles. There’s no way around how huge this is. If you want Safari to be used in corporate America, you must allow for roaming profiles. This means either you let relative pathing do it’s job, or you allow the users to manually set profile locations. The latter plan isn’t really going to work, since Mac lives by the ‘Do everything simply and have the user do nothing.’

    My solutions are simple sounding, and they won’t fix everything, but it’ll get them started.

    Hey, Mac, I used to build MSIs!

  • Bugged

    While many Windows XP users are stressing over the major upgrade of SP2, Mac users got a tiny security patch, a small 10.3.6 upgrade, and a taste of our first, real virus. For years I got to brag about how my Mac would never get a virus and how I was safe because I didn’t have the flaws of Windows, or Outlook, or what have you. Then, right around Halloween, came the Opener malware script. It’s not a virus, but I’ll save that rant for another day. Opener has existed for Unix for years and since OS X is a Unix based operating system, it makes some small sense that Opener was adapted to a Mac platform. The benefit is that it’s a known entity and not all that hard to remove.

    Malware is software that does bad (mal) things. Opener is a shell script (similar to DOS) that attacks the root of your computer. Instead of emailing everyone you know, or deleting your user directory, Opener attacks your firewall, installs remote access software, plunks down a password decoder app (John the Ripper, of all things) and proceeds to take over your Macintosh. Pretty hefty for a first virus. Symantec calls it SH.Renepo.B, and their write up of it covers all its evilness in great detail.

    The blessing is that Opener has to be installed, either by hand or by another executable, and the safest way to prevent it from happening is to not install software you don’t get off a CD, lock your computer when you walk away, and use secure passwords. If you’re into filesharing, be it Limewire, Kazza or BitTorrent, be very careful. One of the ways this is distributed is in a PKG or DMG file, wrapped around the actually program you’re trying to install.

    None of this would have been possible if Macintosh hadn’t gone to OS X, the Unix based operating system.

    I hailed OS X as a fantastic leap forward for Macintosh. One of Mac’s many problems is the lack of software available. Sure, they have some of the best, native, handwriting recognition software ever (Newton 1.0 not withstanding) in Inkwell, and Microsoft 2004 is fantastic, but truly a fifth of the programs available for Windows can be found for Mac. By breaking Macintosh into the Unix world, suddenly Mac aficionados found themselves immersed in the open source world of Unix.

    Upgrading from System 9 to OS X was no mean feat and as with all upgrades, it’s not the sort of thing you should do on a whim. System 9 and OS X are as different as 95 and XP, just as System 7 to System 8 was giant Macintosh leap. The main problem everyone saw with OS X is that the majority of the software used had to be rewritten. To a degree, this backfired on Macintosh, as the prohibitive cost of upgrading hardware and software daunted a fair number of users. Apple built in a safety catch called Classic Mode, which let you run some (but not all) software via an emulator. I removed mine from my Mac after a year, having rarely used it.

    The other secret blessing was that Mac had been urging coders to move to a setup called ‘Cocoa.’ Cocoa apps had a fancier look and feel than the generic old school (classic) Mac, and a very different underlying structure. Microsoft, Adobe, and just about every major software company except Quark had jumped onto the Cocoa bandwagon, and many Mac users were pleasantly surprised at how much of their software simply worked natively on OS X.

    That was a very long digression to the heart of this tip, which is how to upgrade to Mac OS X.

    A lot of people are still on OS 8 or 9, and having been there, I tell you that you really need to upgrade. The actual upgrade process is not painless, and having heard the horror stories of XP SP2, I think they’re rather comparable. Unless you want to take your Mac to the Apple Store, you have to purchase the CD, and it’s not going to have the latest and greatest security patches. If you don’t have high speed internet, the upgrade will take a very long time (3 days on a 14.4 modem based on an upgrade I did last month).

    The first thing you have to know is that you must not, under any circumstances, simply throw in the CD and let it boot to the CD by holding down the magic C key. If your Mac didn’t come with OS X, the odds are that this will not work because your firmware is out of date. For most Mac users, this ‘firmware’ concept was new and unwelcome. I can count the times I’d ever done it on a Macintosh on one hand, and I’ve supported a lot of Macs.

    Apple.com has a great chart on which computers need an upgrade and where to get it. Surprisingly enough, the very new PowerMac G5s need an upgrade, while some iBooks from 2001 don’t at all. My rule of thumb is always to check if I need a firmware, as there’s no real way to know unless you memorize the list. If you happen to have OS X 10.0 or 10.1, you may have managed to upgrade without the firmware, and you’ll need to do it now to proceed. The catch here is that you have to apply these firmware bits with System 9. If you’ve already nuked your classic set up, you may be out of luck. Apple suggests that you start from System 9.2.2 at the lowest, though I’ve found you can upgrade from 9.1 in a pinch.

    Before you upgrade, remember to write down (or print) your internet settings. Yeah, I know it goes without saying, but having seen people call their ISP for tech support on getting a Mac set up at 3 AM, well, best to be safe. If you’re on dialup, go to Control Panels from the Apple menu, and then choose Remote Access from the submenu that appears. That’s where your ID, dial-up number, and password are kept. If you’re on DSL, check with your ISP, though I’ve found that my Macs auto-detect the setup very nicely.

    The next trick is actually upgrading. No matter what they tell you, don’t insert the CD and reboot, holding down the C key. While that might work for a new Mac, bought within the last two years, if your Mac is seriously older, you’re better off inserting the CD and clicking restart button from within the CD window that pops up. There are a few reasons for this, but the simplest one is that not all CD drives are created equal, and not all will reboot to the CD correctly. If you don’t start it from the CD, you may find yourself on a grey screen with a rainbow colored beach-ball, and a panic attack. Don’t worry, just reboot (unplug if you have to) and run it the other way.

    Once you get the upgrade started, go out for coffee. It takes a long time. Mac says 30-60 minutes. I say double it. After the whole thing was done, I still had about an hour or two of software updates, which was really frustrating. Even when I bought a new Mac from the store and asked them to run the latest updates, I found that I had a couple left when I got home. I chalk it up to bad timing, but it was really annoying. The software update feature’s been around since System 8, but I find it useful. I have mine set to check once a week (Thursdays, 7pm) and to download the update in the background. It slows my net imperceptibly, although I am on DSL, and when I tell it to install, it slashes the time for that considerably.

    Once everything is upgraded and done and configured, the actual ‘work’ takes less than an hour. Mac imports all your documents to their ‘new’ place, and if it didn’t, you still have access to the old sections. Most people I know did an ‘update’, leaving their old system files intact. I was the sort who backed up my documents and software, and did a full wipe the hard drive reinstall when I bumped to OS X 10.2. After all, I wanted the pure Macintosh feeling. The downside to that is you automatically loose Classic Mode, and any way of accessing the old Mac software. I didn’t find it a great loss.

    Mac has their own site all about why you should upgrade as well as one on why you should switch from Windows. I don’t think everyone should use a Macintosh, but I do think everyone who uses a Mac and can switch to OS X should. Mac’s aren’t for everyone, and while Mac pitches a hundred stories about people who love their Macs, I’m sure there are a hundred people who love their PCs. I’m not trying to start a flame war. I think people should keep an open mind. If all you want is email, word processing, and the web, a Macintosh may not be a bad idea.

    How to Upgrade: Switch to Mac