What's it all about, Alfie?

While I can certainly deal with the installation of Mac OS X apps, I have to say that when I see an Installer package, I cringe slightly. You never know what they are doing, and if it's not from Apple, the reasons for putting things outside the app bundle are really minimal. Sure, utilities, web add-ons, they make sense. But apps shouldn't. Period.

Then the problem is the delivery mechanism. Is it a DMG file and then the user has to drag it out of the mounted disk image into the usable drive space someplace? Sure, symlinks on the DMG make this a little easier to drag it into the Applications folder, but still, that's a pain.

Then there's the Zip file where the application is unpacked into the Downloads folder. Not bad, but again, it has to be manually moved to a better place. Better, but still not ideal.

Then there's the Move on Startup idea. Delicious Library (among others, I'm sure) has this feature where if the application is launched from a DMG image or the Downloads folder, it asks the user if they want to move the app to the Applications folder. This one-time step, along with Sparkle, is about the most fool-proof way to deliver an application. Make it a Zip, let them move it or launch it right from the Downloads folder, and then move it into it's final spot. Sweet.

It gets even better because there's a GitHub project for this behavior so anyone can make use of it: LetsMove. I haven't dug into it, but it's probably not all that hard to detect the location and the tricky part will be the move. But still... there it is. I'll have to make use of that (and Sparkle) in my projects that I take public.

Well, as promised, NetNewsWire 3.2 has shipped and with it, an ad 'panel' at the bottom of the list of feeds. Thankfully, for a mere $9.95 you can purchase a license for NetNewsWire and get those ads removed. Very reasonable cost.

There's a lot there that I don't take advantage of, but what's there is incredibly valuable to me each morning. Great application.

Well, I'm really glad this happened... Google has finally gotten push email for GMail accounts. Sure, it's using the Microsoft Exchange connector in the iPhone OS 3.x, but still, that's a lot better than the polling I had to do in the past. Also, the Yahoo! push email was very unreliable in my usage. Sometimes I'd get emails in a minute or two, and sometimes I wouldn't get them until I opened up the Mail app and it scanned for me. Far too unreliable to use everyday.

But with GMail Push, I can (and did) move my iPhone email to GMail and then redirected the forwarder on iphone@bobbeaty.com to the new GMail account. Then, by following these simple instructions, I was able to get my GMail on the iPhone. Very nice.

When I sent a test email from my laptop to my iPhone, it arrived in less than 3 seconds. Amazing. You can't beat Google for good engineering. Thankfully, I used the domain mail forwarding so that changing the underlying email account was easy and didn't effect the stream of emails. What a sweet deal.

This morning I saw that VLC 1.0.2 is out with an improved Mac OS X interface and a slew of updates and fixes. It's the "working part" of HandBrake, so I like to keep it up to date so I can rip DVDs.

This morning I saw that iTunes 9.0.1 is now on Software Updates. It appears to be a handful of bug fixes as well as improvements in syncing for iPhones (yeah!) and they reverted the behavior of the "maximize" jelly - now it's the Option-Click that maximizes it and a simple click makes it the mini viewer. Nice. It' great to see them respond to user feedback.

Today was one of those days that, I believe, defines what kind of person you are. Are you a person that can knuckle down and do what's needed even though every fiber of your being is screaming that it's the wrong thing to do? Where is the individual and the team defined in your mind? How much can the team request as sacrifice from the individual? It's interesting questions because we all think we know where we sit on the questions, but it's really when push comes to shove that we learn where we really sit.

Today I thought I was done with a very distasteful bit of coding. To call it a 'bit' is to call Lake Michigan a 'pond'. It was a week of 11-hour days of the most intense, horriffic coding that I've done in a very long time. But, like ripping a band-aid off, once it was done, I could move on to nicer things.

Yet, as soon as I was done I got several requests from folks "...yeah, I wasn't right on that, it needs to be like this..." and "Great! Now add this". In the end, I received in a 4 hour period enough work to keep me busy for the rest of this week, and possibly into the next.

To add to this insult, some of the requests were for changes in the Flex client part of the project. While I've done some Flex coding, it's nothing like what I needed to do the request, and I said so. The original author that handed me this project said "Sure, it's doable". I wanted to scream at him then and there: Shut up unless you are going to do the change! But I didn't. I'm already too "gruff" for the office.

So I'm back at the bottom. It was as if all the work didn't matter - worse it was because of all the work that I got more. I wanted to sit and cry - or maybe just plain leave. I had been telling management that this system was a pain to work in... like it taking more than 5,000 lines of java code to add less than a dozen fields to the system... it's a monster and it's not getting any easier to work with given all the additions.

So to hear that I had effectively brought down more work in this horrible project upon myself was simply more than I could bear. I was more than a little angry at the original developer who, like Pilot, had washed his hands of his horrible incarnation. If only...

Anyway, I had a bunch more work to do, so laying it out in my notes, I dug in and started working. What I found was that the requests had generated a ton of new work. Amazing. They think these things are "simple", or "easy", and in a good system, they would be, but this isn't a good system. It's not even "reasonable." It's crummy - and that's being kind.

So, now I'm down... then I'm kicked... and it's not getting any better anytime soon. I still need to do all this work, and then I'm sure there's going to be add-ons after that. In a very real sense, I've learned that my skills are like anything of value: a double-edged sword, and I'm feeling the cuts very deeply today.

Because I can do this, I'm told to do this.

Regardless of my warnings, advice, professional judgement... none of that matters because a few days of my time is considered insignificant and the results fantastic. Who cares if I want to scream every minute of every hour while I'm doing it?

Gotta love the "bottom line".

Brent has released a new beta of NetNewsWire 3.2b28 with improved syncing that is far more efficient and accurate. It was faster on the load because it was hitting fewer servers - only those that needed it, and that's always a pleasure to see. It's getting better, and I'm really hoping that there's a "no ads" option that's not subscription based.

Oddly, this didn't come across on Software Updates, but it's worthy to update for the little printing I do. The install was particularly time-consuming, and for a while there I was thinking it was hung up. But it was just taking a long time. In the end, it was all OK, and now I have the latest printer drivers. I'm still wondering if it's coming to Software Update soon... Hmm... if not, I'll have to manually update the other machines in the house.

Years ago I got an SGI Indigo² workstations with High Impact graphics, and was simply blown away by blender on that machine. It had something like 384MB RAM, and a sub-200MHz R10k, but it could run blender like it was a machine with 100 times that processing power. Since then, I haven't done a lot with blender, but I have staid up to date with it on my Macs as the graphics are better, the CPUs are better, and it was a great experience.

Today the blender crew released Blender 2.49b and I had to get it. It seems to run very nicely on Snow Leopard, but then again, the entire app was written in OpenGL, so if the graphics are good, the app is good. Nice to see it's still being worked on.

They seem to be getting close to a release with Growl 1.2b4 as the release notes are less about bugs and more about tweaks in the app. Minimum version of OS X, icon layout in the DMG, etc. These things are the polish on the app as opposed to the real meat of the functionality. Good to see.