Beckism.com

Notice note about newly released Cornerstone Subversion application at Daring Fireball. Download Cornerstone. Launch it and connect to my free Beanstalk account (a.k.a. Mr. Sandbox). Create folder. Notice typo in folder name. Select folder and hit enter in order to rename. Fail. Right-click folder and look for rename option. Fail. View Info pane. Fail. View Properties pane. Fail. Go through every menu and sub-menu for a rename option. Fail.

Open up Versions beta. Connect to Beanstalk. Right-click folder and choose Rename option. Rename folder quickly and easily. Hooray!

Have a thought. Switch to Cornerstone. Click folder once, then hover cursor over it for a second or two. Folder name becomes selected with a typing cursor. Oh. Right.

Exit out of the renaming, since the folder is no longer typo-a-rific in the repository. Check toolbar for a way to refresh the repository. Fail. Right-click the main area. Fail. Double click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Fail. Right-click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Doesn’t even have a context menu. Open the gear menu in the sidebar (bizarrely positioned at the top). Fail. Go through every menu and sub-menu a second time. Fail. Attempt to rename the folder in the hopes that it will encourage the repository to refresh itself. Fail. Bizarre error message.

Quit Cornerstone. Trash Cornerstone. Hope for Versions to be a real product soon.

Mariner Software today released MacGourmet Deluxe. MacGourmet has long been my favorite recipe software (it’s interface is pretty badly cluttered and could definitely be improved on, but it’s far and away better than the competition and the fullscreen cook’s view is excellent), and now MacGourmet Deluxe offers all three of the plug-ins (cookbook, mealplan, and nutrition info) as integrated parts of the program. This is a particularly good deal if you already own MacGourmet 2 but neglected to buy any of the plugins, since the upgrade fee to MacGourmet Deluxe is a meager $10. It also has a snazzy new icon that I like a lot better than MacGroumet’s plastic spoon:

I highly recommend anyone who is looking for a better way to manage their favorite recipes to take a look at MacGourmet Deluxe. It’s a program that I don’t use all that often, but when I need to find that favorite recipe I can count on it being in MacGourmet and super easy to find and access.

MacGourmet Deluxe will also be available as boxed software, so good luck to Advenio and Mariner Software in spreading the word about the best recipe software on the Mac to an even larger crowd.

My girlfriend and I went to see Get Smart a couple days ago, and it was a lot of fun. Not the best movie I’ve seen this year, but funny, goofy, and well-acted. Some of the humor occasionally crosses into the crude or excessive-physical-pain-as-slapstick realms (neither of which are really my thing), but such moments are balanced by the large number of hilarious bits throughout the movie that don’t rely on more vulgar humor (”Mom, Mom, Mom!” “Sean, Sean, Sean! See how annoying that is?”).

I highly recommend Get Smart for anyone who enjoys spy movies, comedies, or the classic TV show. It was well worth a trip to the theater.

OfficeTime is, quite simply, the best time tracker and invoicing solution I’ve been able to find. Every so often I try the competition in the hopes that it will have covered more of the features that I need (OfficeTime is lacking in a couple minor areas), but the other time trackers never have OfficeTime’s simplicity and flexibility combined with its power.

Unfortunately, whenever I recommend OfficeTime recently people are put off by the price. It started at a modest $25 (when I purchased it), but as the developer has been adding features they’ve been steadily ramping the price up (currently it’s almost twice what I paid). Of course, the increase in price hasn’t mattered for me since they’ve never charged an update fee, but it’s a shame that such a great piece of software has become a much harder sell. However, today June 19, 2008 only OfficeTime is on sale for $25 once more from MacUpdate Promo. If you are a freelancer or otherwise need to track your time during the day accurately and easily, I strongly recommend OfficeTime. It’s ease of use and powerful reports are far superior to any of the other Mac time tracking software I’ve found.

Even if you miss the sale, you might be able to get OfficeTime at a discount since the MacUpdate promo usually runs decreasingly good discounts over several weeks. Try a direct link to OfficeTime on MacUpdate Promo to give it a shot.

InterWorld (or the Kindle version, which is what I read) by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reeves was disappointing. It’s not bad; I’d characterize it as mediocre but harmed by my expectations for the authors. Gaiman and Reeves have imagined a very vivid world, but the pacing and characterization (particularly in the beginning) leave the whole thing a bit flat. The last half is actually a lot better than the first; this feels like the kind of book whose sequels (if there are any) will outshine the original because they won’t be burdened with exposition. I think the problem is that we don’t get eased into the action at all; if it were a graphic novel the abrupt shift from mundane reality into wild science-fantasy would probably work, but as a novel I was left wondering just why I was supposed to care about some of the characters (or believe the over-the-top settings).

Pretty disappointing for a Neil Gaiman novel (even if he was collaborating). I have not been impressed with much of Gaiman’s work since Anansi Boys, and even that wasn’t as good as its predecessors. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors who has a brilliant early career but isn’t able to sustain it.

Almost exactly three weeks ago, I read MacInTouch’s fantastic Kindle review (thanks to Daring Fireball for linking to it) and it threw doubt on everything I had thought about the Kindle. When I first saw the device and read some other people’s opinions on it, my immediate impression was “eh, kind of cool but definitely not for me.” I simply love physical books too much; I’ve been collecting them since the first Scholastic ordering form was handed to me in grade school. I dream of someday living in a place where one room’s walls are nothing but bookshelves. I may not be a full-blown bibliophile haunting the local used bookstore with a crazed look in my eye, but I’m the next closest thing.

Aside from the MacInTouch review, there were two things that made me sit back and re-eavluate myself as a potential Kindle owner:

• After a mere seven months of living on my own with some expendable income, I am out of shelf space. Worse, I am out of space for new shelves. And since I need to move closer to the city center, my next apartment will likely be smaller rather than larger. Plus moving the shelves and books that I’ve amassed since I moved in is going to be a heinous bitch in and of itself.
• At the time, I had a four-day weekend in a cabin in the woods coming up, and for most of my life vacations have meant packing a bag full of books that I then have to lug around with me. I have never enjoyed this, but I read too quickly for one or two books slipped in my suitcase to suffice. Up to 200 books in a device that weighs 10.3 ounces was sounding pretty good (price notwithstanding).

Although it took some intense deliberation, Twittering, and Amazon review-reading, I ended up purchasing a Kindle in time to take it with me on my mini-vacation. I haven’t been that torn over an electronics purchase in years.

And having owned the device for about two and a half weeks now, including four days of hard-core stress-testing in a cabin in the mountains with no cell service or internet (reading inside, reading outside in the sun, reading in the car, reading in bed with few lights, reading for upwards of six hours straight), I have come to realize that buying a Kindle was a huge mistake.

In my first week of Kindle ownership, I read the equivalent of over 3,000 pages, to the detriment of sleep, work, and time with my girlfriend. I’ve been going to bed 1-2 hours later (and getting a corresponding 1-2 hours less sleep every night). I’ve spent in the neighborhood of $100-200 on ebooks (which, given how long I’ve owned it, means almost $100 a week). I’ve gone from checking email and RSS feeds regularly throughout the day to checking them once or twice every two days. Owning a Kindle has in short disrupted a wide range of my daily habits and routines by making it ludicrously easy to read anytime, anywhere, without effort.

Imagine handing a crack addict a $400 device that allows them to download cocaine directly into their brain. That is what owning a Kindle has been like. Although it does not provide the visceral pleasure of a well-designed hardback, it has allowed me to consummate my addiction to the written word in a way that nothing prior in my life has ever approached. Like MacInTouch I’ve found that what looked like a clumsy device in screenshots is actually a joy to use that has obviously received intense attention to its design.

In short, I’m hopelessly in love.

That isn’t to say that the Kindle is perfect, however. Although I’ve grown accustomed to it, the form factor is still something I’d love to see improved. Turning the page accidentally (particularly if I’ve briefly set the device down and am picking it up again) is all too easy. The refresh rate of the display, although fine for turning pages, is unwieldy and frustrating when it comes to looking up words, accessing the internet, or doing anything where only part of the screen needs to refresh. It is very difficult to, say, jump back ten “pages” to review what just happened.

I hope that these flaws are rectified in the next version of the Kindle (which likely isn’t on the immediate horizon), but even all of them combined aren’t enough to diminish my enjoyment of the device here and now. Partially this is because the Kindle is a fantastic and novel service rather than just a reading device. Partially it’s because the reading device is designed well enough that it fulfills its function with style and grace sufficient to outweigh its demerits.

But mostly it’s because my obsession with books is firmly grounded in a much stronger obsession with reading, and the Kindle makes obtaining and reading quality new material as easy as the turn of a page.

I’m sure this is self-evident for anyone with halfway decent knowledge of the Unix command-line, but it took me some searching through multiple sources to figure it out. (Kept getting env: python\r: No such file or directory errors whenever I tried to run the script on its own.)

If you need to run a Python script in the Mac OS X Terminal, save the script somewhere on your hard drive and run the following command:

python path/to/script [options]

Obviously, replace [options] with any options or arguments that the script accepts (or leave it off entirely). Remember that if you’re using bash for your shell, you can hit tab to autocomplete paths (which speeds things up a lot) and you’ll need to escape any spaces in paths with a backslash:

python ~/Documents/My\ Python\ Scripts/script.sh

Please note: I’m using OS 10.5; I believe the above will work with 10.2+ (since I think that’s when Python was bundled with the OS), but your mileage will vary. If you’re having issues, the Python documentation was one of the best resources I found, and of course the help file for the python command was useful once I figured out I needed to use a command other than running the script (type man python to access it).

I hate the fact that A&W now caffeinates their cream soda (caffeine makes me weird), so in my search for alternatives I picked up a 12-pack of Jones Cream Soda at the store the other day.

Unless you are a hummingbird, do not drink this stuff. It’s like drinking syrup (sans the viscosity). My girlfriend, who normally is of the opinion that more sugar equals more fun, ended up pouring most of a can down the sink. I drank a can with lunch, and while I made it all the way through the resulting headache argues I should have followed her example. This stuff is ridiculously sweet.

Perhaps Jones Soda has always been sickeningly sweet (I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it before, and lord knows there’s a market). If so, and you’re not already a fan (or hummingbird), consider yourself warned. As for me, the search for a lower budget cream soda alternative continues. I do love me the Thomas Kemper Cream Soda, but it’s hard to justify the cost for day-to-day consumption (as a side note, their Ginger Ale is also to die for).

Although it’s been a mere nine short months since the last time PathFinder was on the MacUpdate promo, it’s come back for another run. I highly recommend PathFinder; along with LaunchBar, it is one of the tools that I can’t make it through a work day without. Basically, if you haven’t experienced the PathFinder tabbed interface and drop stack, you haven’t lived. For today, May 8, 2008 only you can get PathFinder for $19.95, 43% off its normal price.

Even if you miss the deal, you’ll likely still be able to get PathFinder through MacUpdate for a discount a few days to weeks afterward. Here’s a direct link to the PathFinder page, so feel free to check it out.

If you take a close look at my current Dock, you may notice something rather ridiculous:

For those who didn’t get past the funky CandyBar-ed Finder and Trash icons (courtesy of Icontraband), icons number four and five are both RSS readers: NetNewsWire and Times, respectively. NetNewsWire, of course, has been the de facto standard of Mac RSS readers for years, but Times is a newcomer to the scene (released only last week). I discovered Times via Daring Fireball and on first glance agreed with John Gruber’s analysis; it was an appealing looking interface, but probably not for me. With the various software blogs and so forth that I follow for Tagamac, NetNewsWire handles about 140 different feeds, and Times’ newspaper-style interface didn’t look nearly robust enough to handle them.

It isn’t. In fact, along with that discovery a quick review of my first Times impressions is none too pleasant:

• Times is incessant nagware. I don’t mind if a program reminds me there’s a demo period when I launch it, but when it does it periodically throughout the time while it’s running, I start wishing that I could somehow transmit electric shocks through the internet to the developer.
• Times can’t keep track of unread feeds to save its life. When you have a lot of feeds to read, you need to know which articles deserve attention and which don’t. Times is extremely buggy in this regard. If I’m lucky, it will mark unread articles with little blue bullets for a single feed on a single page. If I’m unlucky, it won’t mark anything unread at all.
• Times is slow. Aside from the slowdowns that you occasionally get from all the Core Animation shenanigans, Times by design moves at a casual pace.
• Times has a criminal lack of keyboard support. By default the program doesn’t even have shortcuts for commonly-used menu items like “Mark all articles as read”, never mind any semblance of keyboard navigation.
• Times feels buggy. Overall, Times works well, but it didn’t take me long to start running across small, frustrating bugs (like Times loading external article text for Daring Fireball’s linked list, despite my checking the “disable full article downloading” checkbox).
• When something fails, the user gets no explanation and often no feedback. Multiple feeds that I’ve added have simply failed to work (despite validating in Times, and working perfectly in NetNewsWire); no explanation by the program of why. Given the number of small bugs that I’ve come across in just five days of use, this is extremely foolish on the part of the developer because it means that I can’t communicate to him accurately what isn’t working.

Yet despite that impressive laundry list of cons, I used Times for four days, then moved it to a permanent place in my Dock and purchased it. And I don’t have a single regret.

The reason is simple. All of my feeds fit neatly into one of two categories: feeds whose headlines I skim, and feeds where I read every headline and often read every article. NetNewsWire is great for the former category; Times is perfect for the latter (minor bugs notwithstanding).

When I first ventured into feed readers, I liked NewsFire because it was easy to scroll quickly through the “New Items” list and keep track of which feed I was looking at while I went. This meant I could quickly skim the feeds I didn’t care about much and read the ones I did care about more carefully. When I switched to NetNewsWire (prompted by NewsFire’s lack of updates and several annoying shortcomings), I organized my feeds into two primary groups based on how much focus I gave each (further organized by topic in most instances). However, I was never happy with NetNewsWire’s workflow because its Latest News area is worthless (particularly compared to NewsFire’s). It’s just far too difficult to keep track of what feed a headline comes from when that info is stored in columns. I found myself clicking around in the NetNewsWire sidebar for every feed that I cared about, and then skimming through collections of feeds in folders for the ones I didn’t care about. It worked, but it never really sat well with me.

Times is completely inappropriate for skimming through large numbers of feeds, but it’s perfect for a small number of feeds where you want to focus on every headline. The program uses the metaphor of a newspaper, complete with different pages and sections within those pages. Two of the three sections can contain multiple feeds, and you can resize the sections to provide a couple variations on the basic three-section page. By default, when you click a headline, Times folds or slides down to reveal the full text (your choice; I chose slide as the less superfluous and quicker of the two). If the feed doesn’t contain full text, Times tries to fetch it from the webpage to display for you (extremely handy for major news sites that provide a couple sentences or less, although sure to give them headaches in the bandwidth department).

I didn’t expect to enjoy browsing through articles in Times, but I do. Not only does it provide an easy way to track just the feeds I want to read, but the attractive interface, ability to read full text without the distraction of the flashing ads normally littering the page, and just overall laid-back and friendly attitude of the program make using it a joy that offset my frustration with its various small bugs and shortcomings.

I didn’t really fall in love with the program, though, until I added a couple keyboard shortcuts using the System Preferences “Keyboard & Mouse” pane. Adding shortcuts to just two menu items made all the difference: “Mark All Articles as Read” received command-K and “Return to Page” (the command you have to trigger while reading the full-text version of the article) got the plain old left arrow. With these two commands, using Times became a relaxing one-hand maneuver: I use my right hand on my laptop’s trackpad to scroll through any sections on the page or click article headlines. Spacebar or two-finger scrolling takes me through the full text, and then it’s a short reach for my pinky to the left arrow to return to the page. When I’m done, command-K is again a very short reach away and all is right with the world.

What clinched the deal for me, really, was that the developer has been fixing bugs as fast as he can. Although he hasn’t been particularly responsive, he’s surely facing a mountain of feedback, and I’ve seen multiple bugs (and a small feature request) that I ran across and reported fixed within days. Plus the dude’s 19 years old and probably has homework or term papers to write. Given how polished Times looks (even with its usability shortcomings), I’ve got high hopes for its future. The newspaper metaphor is a great alternative to standard feed readers, and makes Times vastly different from the rest of the crowd. And if we’re lucky, Acrylic Apps will take the newspaper metaphor even further (I want to put the webcomics that I read on a single comics page in Times; who’s with me?) as they continue to refine and improve the program.

Despite my expectations and initial impressions, I’ve ended up a happy user of Times and NetNewsWire both, and I highly recommend Times for anyone who wants an elegant way to track a small number of feeds they care about. This is certainly not a program for everyone, but if its presentation of news makes sense to you, I doubt you’ll look back.