The Distress Signal

Shame On Gizmodo

This is why we can’t have nice stuff. When Engadget originally posted the pics of the allegedly new iPhone HD/4g over the weekend I took it with a big grain of salt. Apple hardware hardly ever leaks. It looked real enough, even though those unsightly seams and that odd volume rocker screamed fake. Ultimately I figured Ihnatko was right and that it was just an knock-off from somewhere in the Far East.

Then, as the story continued to unfold I got more and more intrigued. The same phone seemed to show up in some spy shots taken right before the iPad event; there were older photos that had found their way onto TwitPic back in February; Gruber was talking about an old Apple patent for a ceramic casing that made the new “ice cream sandwich” like design seem more plausible. This was starting to get interesting. Some good old fashioned Apple kremlinology was going on. Good stuff.

Then, as the story continued to unfold I got more and more intrigued. The same phone seemed to show up in some spy shots taken right before the iPad event; there were older photos that had found their way onto TwitPic back in February; Gruber was talking about an old Apple patent for a ceramic casing that made the new “ice cream sandwich” like design seem more plausible. This was starting to get interesting. Some good old fashioned Apple kremlinology was going on. Good stuff.

Step One: Buy Stolen Goods

I’m no lawyer, but apparently in California any person who finds something lost is under obligation to identify the owner if possible and return it. By ignoring that obligation and instead selling the item to a third party you are in essence stealing it. And, here’s the bad part for Gizmodo: By paying for that stolen item they share in the thief’s intent to deprive the rightful owner of their property.

Step Two: Get Douchey

After posting all the gory details of the phone Gizmodo then went on to publicly ridicule the poor engineer who “lost” it. Seriously? Was that necessary? They could have easily written up the story of how they came into possession of the phone without publicly pointing their finger at the guy and plastering around embarrassing photos from his Flickr and Facebook accounts. Identifying him individually adds absolutely nothing to the story.

I’m part of the problem: Now I’ll admit to browsing over to Gizmodo to have a look at the pics and videos they posted of the device. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, I don’t know. One thing I know for sure though is that I felt guilty afterwards. Like a kid that snuck into his parents bedroom to have a peek at his Christmas presents before they were wrapped. Looking back I’d have been happier if the story had ended with Engadget’s spy shots and the rampant speculation taking place on Twitter.

In an effort to make amends I’ll be taking @chockenberry’s advice and editing my local hosts file so I don’t inadvertently give Gizmodo any more traffic than I already have. Too little too late, I know, but at least it’s something.

This whole thing reminds me of the fast one they pulled back in 2006. Back then they made a big stink about having the inside scoop on the, then yet to be released, iPhone. After a long week of making us all wait it turned out to just be a new Cisco product that happend to be called the i-phone. You know how the old saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, go Fuck yourself.

All Things Apple

So I’ve decided to go ahead and throw in my lot with the good folks over at TheAppleBlog when it comes to my rants and reviews about all things Apple, OS X and the like. You’ll be able to see the articles I contribute over there by going to my Author Archive Page or better yet by grabbing the RSS Feed for the whole site. My first post on Proximity Automation (using Bluetooth and AppleScript to automatically fire off actions based on your proximity to the computer) is already available.

They’re a good bunch of folks over there at the AppleBlog and I’ve been enjoying the articles on their site for quite a long time. It was the first place that really got me into using Quicksilver which needless to say totally changed how I use my Mac, so I’m really happy to be joining the team. I’ll still be writing here about other various and sundry things and do plan to pick up the pace now that I have some more free time available for writing.

Pimp Your Quicklook

I’m lucky enough to be able to work on an OS X system at my day job but officially it’s a “Microsoft shop” with most people on Windows and our intranet powered by SharePoint. We store a lot of documents on SharePoint and it’s always a pain in the ass to have to fire up mac office to have a quick look at a .doc or .xls file. To make matters worse there are a lot of Office 2007 files that my version of mac office won’t open.

The solution? Force all these annoying office files to open in Quick Look. This handy little Quick Look Droplet from Apple does the trick. Just download the droplet and tweak your browser settings to use the droplet as the default application for those files.

Now, whenever I need to pop open a file from SharePoint to quickly check something, one click and the document is open in the slick Quick Look interface. And my Mac Office applications stay closed and tucked away somewhere, out of site out of mind.

While your at it why not put Quick Look to work on other “stuff” by adding some new plugins. Just add the .qlgenerator file into your /Library/QuickLook directory and Quick Look will do the rest. I just took a spin through the galleries and pulled out a couple that I like:

• Markup
• Photoshop Brushes
• Folders
• Zip Files

Acceleration Curves

I love OS X. It’s far and away the best operating system I’ve ever used. There are a couple things about it though that have always been a frustration for me. Chief among them is the way movement of the mouse on your desk is translated to movement of the cursor on your screen a process handled by something called the “Acceleration Curve”.

What this curve essentially does is multiply the velocity of the cursor on the screen relative to the velocity of the mouse on the desk. As the movement of the mouse increases the ratio used to calculate the movement of the cursor increases with it. This gives the user more precision when moving the mouse slowly to carry out detailed work and more speed when hauling ass across a 24 inch monitor.

The curve that OS X uses to handle all this stuff has never felt right to me, moving slow feels too slow and moving fast feels too fast. The net result is a beautiful OS ruined by a crappy input experience, I’m certainly not the only one who feels this way. In contrast to the crappy mousing in OS X the curve on windows machines feels fantastically natural and responsive, and I hate windows. You see my problem.

As you probably know, you can control the “Tracking Speed” in OS X within the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane but all this does is control what is essentially the “top speed” of the cursor. If you want to actually change the shape of the acceleration curve you will have to dig a little deeper.

There is this free solution which is a “simple command line program” that lets you substitute the default curve values for your own. It works well enough and someone has even made a slightly more user friendly version of it as well but the problem is that once you power off, your changes to the curve are lost so you will need to run the program every time you start up.

A more expensive solution, and the one I chose, was to purchase this Kensington Expert Mouse which comes with it’s own drivers which give you more control over the shape of your curve. I’ve been using this mouse (OK, I know it’s a trackball but you understand what I’m saying) for almost six months now and I have to say it is without a doubt the best mouse I’v ever owned.

Four big buttons (right/left click, expose, spaces) a nice large and very accurate trackball surrounded by a nicely implemented circular scroll wheel. Add that hardware to the drivers that let me choose an acceleration curve that suits me and OS X is beautiful again. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

QuickPukka

With almost 200 feeds sitting in my RSS reader (Net News Wire) I’ve got a lot of information coming at me everyday. When I see something that I know I’ll want to come back to later I save it as a bookmark on the social bookmarking service delicious. I also use this service to push links to my blog (see the sidebar to the right). To make the process of adding bookmarks a bit easier I’ve been using a mix of Quicksilver, Pukka and Apple Script.

I put together a quick demo of how it all works.

As you can see this setup makes it super easy to add, browse, and open your bookmarks. I’ve done this so often it’s become second nature and it’s absolutely key to the way I access information online.