I HATE APPLE

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2337/2525089926_4bcea24eb0.jpg
^

OS 9 on Intel:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/onpc15

So, is no one else's timemachine playing up after 10.5.3?

I'm either getting 'Latest backup: delayed' or 'Latest backup: failed'.

Re-setting the external hard-drive for Timemachine worked for a bit before the problem started all over again.

That happened to me once or twice in the first few days but has been fine since.

an interesting set of musings about the increasing windows-ness of certain mac apps ... interesting to me, anyway, because we've just moved to windows at work and i'm suffering hellishly with the fact the "document-centric" approach means everything feels so bloody constrained.

that said: tabbed browsing? couldn't live without it. hmm.

That guy, I feel his MDI pain, but to some extent, I think that more "MDI" is inevitable. With bigger and faster computers, you can run more and more apps at once with more documents, and so organizing the clutter becomes a real necessity. Mr. Mathis appears quite keen to deny (and is so bad at doing so) that developers who introduce MDI-ish features are blurring the line between the application-centric and the document-centric approaches more than they are joining the "Windows side": He complains about Safari's tabs, but fails to acknowledge that any tab can be broken out into its own "document" just by pulling on it, and vice-versa (try this if it hasn't occurred to you!) Likewise, he admits having to revise his criticisms of Adobe when confronted with their lax adherence to MDI in CS4: I'd wager that Adobe's approach will be as flexible as Apple's with Safari and more.

The criticisms in re: spaces/expose are valid to some extent, but come on, spaces is crap and basically nothing works "right" with it now anyways. With regard to expose, Apple could provide API hooks to break out "tabs" in expose, but that'd exacerbate the very problem tabs were designed to solve: Would you rather look at N applications when you hit F9 or N applications x M documents? My thinking is that the very reason a person puts a document in a background tab is because it's not important enough to be tiled in expose.

As long as MDI isn't the exclusive mode of presentation, I think that it has a lot to offer for the Mac platform, and really, I think that the distinction between application-centric and document-centric will eventually vanish on Mac.

I'm not so sure -- the menu bar mitigates against it. Though in the next few years more and more things are really going to be all in the browser, so it gets a bit moot.

I love MDI when I only have to deal with one window -- Safari, Textmate, any tabs really. I loathe it when I have fully-fledged windows pointlessly constrained inside other windows, as in Windows.

yeh, i think that's the key. when i'm in -- say -- safari, i'm usually looking at one window and one window only. it's very rare i want to be able to flick my eyes between two different documents at once. and if i *do* want to do that, it is -- as libcrypt says -- easy.

but at work, i often want to have two indesign or incopy documents open next to each other at the same time, and be able to not just read them both but to cut and paste between them. the way i create the television pages for our paper, for instance, depends upon doing this with three documents open at once. on a mac, i can put these three windows wherever i want on the screen; on windows, they all have to live within the "application" window, which is a mammoth pain in the arse. yes, i can *do* it, but it's neither easy nor elegant.

but yes, libcrypt is right: the key thing is that the user has choice over how they want their windows displayed. and i do feel the mac offers me that, always. i'd be very surprised if adobe suddenly fucked that up with all their apps.

I loathe it when I have fully-fledged windows pointlessly constrained inside other windows, as in Windows.

This is powerful annoying, I agree. You've GOT to be able to break things out when necessary. That whole window-minimized-or-floating-inside-another-window bullshit is intolerable. However, I'd wager that Adobe will be picking up on the virtues of MDI and disregarding these flaws.

My curiosity is piqued tho, so I'm downloading a few betas from Adobe now to see what we're in for.

WHY ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT CS4 ALREADY!

Goddamn slow down Adobe! It took me long enough to get CS3 going.

possibly old:

<img src="http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/macbook-19821983-projektion-zur-zukunft-des-notebooks.jpg";>

[img src="http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/macbook-19821983-projektion-zur-zukunft-des-notebooks.jpg";]

http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/macbook-19821983-projektion-zur-zukunft-des-notebooks.jpg

http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/8CEFDCCF-C2F1-4DB1-BE05-26DECB788743.html

link? xpost

http://blog.iso50.com/?p=1832

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2088/2366597370_71e638bc98.jpg?v=0

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katemo/2366597370/

What Microsoft fails (or at least failed up to 2003; I've not used Office 2007) to understand is (a) that applications need to be CONSISTENT, especially if they form part of the one suite, and (b) how users use applications.

Today all I wanted to do was copy text out of one Excel spreadsheet and paste it into another. But no. It all HAS to exist in one parent window (Word doesn't behave like this btw), so I had to keep alt+tabbing between the spreadsheets. There is literally no reason for designing the application this way.

Apple gets users. It gets that people need to do simple things with an interface that requires a tiny bit of forethought. Apple puts that effort into doing the interface properly. Microsoft? No. Everything is tacked onto everything else like Blu-Tack, and eventually you're left with a hulking rancid cripple of a product like Office 2003.

This is coming from someone who's never, ever, done anything productive on a Mac, ever.

Excel for Mac is a pretty good app. As far as I'm concerned Excel is MS's best application, and the UI is probably better on Mac, although the Mac version has some serious database connectivity issues. Mac Office is not MDI, and while the MS MBU has gone to great lengths to avoid dirtying themselves with Cocoa, the Office suite is reasonably Mac-legit, although Excel is the only application I'd use if I weren't forced.

10.5.3 upgrade seems to have made the whole machine run like shit. froze twice last night and turned on frozen this morning. what the fuck? I think I have a time machine back up pre upgrade, try that?

10.5.3 cause problems with anyone else?

I find Excel on the Mac much slower than the PC version. My 2ghz core duo noticeably struggles to keep up with a 1.2ghz single proc PC on some sheets. Also the Office 2007 interfaces kicks all sorts of shite out of the Mac 08 one, especially Word.

Anybody here experts on Applescript? I really want to merge 2 of the sample scripts that come with InDesign. They're both pretty basic but I can't figure out how to marry them, I tried just pasting one after the other, but it got confused since they both call up a dialog box.

dan: http://rafb.net/paste

I think it'd be easier to just tell what the two scripts are, no?

You mean give their names here? Why would that be useful?

so somebody who knows how to do applescript can fix them for me!

Dude, the point is that unless we can see inside the scripts, ain't gonna be no helpin' for ya unless the folks in question happen to have InDesign (which I do not).

OK, i figured anybody who'd be able to help would have indesign. I'll post them to paste.

these are the two scripts:

http://rafb.net/p/P7NYTM51.html
http://rafb.net/p/lbna3745.html

One takes a box and makes crop marks from it. The other takes a box and makes guidelines from it. I'd like a script that gave you one dialogue box asking about both the crops AND guides, and made the crops and guides at the same time.

and what would REALLY be great is if it made another set of guidelines .125" around the first. I wonder if It could be coded to just do that, or do something where it duplicates the first box, enlarges is .25" from the center, then makes guides from that box.

The main problem here -- there well may be others -- appears to be that pasting together the two scripts results in multiply defined functions (e.g. on myDisplayDialog()). If you carefully rename the functions in one script to remove these collisions, you may be able to paste them together.

Now, if you want just ONE dialog box (just reread that part), you will probably have to learn a little applescript.

I'm fine with 2 boxes, like if one pops up after the other.

Start with renaming all the occurrences of "myDisplayDialog" in one of the scripts to "myDisplayDialogFirst" or something and then paste 'em together.

holy damn, it's working!

I've now got one script that takes a box, makes crops to my preset specs, then adds guides for those crops.

Now I need to figure out how to add bleed guidelines (guides that are 1/8" further out than the crops.

I LOVE APPLE

Did the renaming tactic work?

yes absolutely. Now I'm close to figuring out the rest. There are two tough parts (and note I haven't programmed since 10 goto 20 on the Commodore 64), one is to have the dialogue box have a checkbox for adding bleed, and if selected, basically repeating the same guide drawing procedure in the second script, but adding and subtracting an 1/8th inch from the location. I took me a while to realize you can't use inches because the " marks mess it up, so it has to be done in points.

woah, I did it.

almost.

Applescript is delightfully awful.

well I'm impressed that I was able to figure this much out without knowing anything, but now something isn't working and there just aren't that many variables that can be wrong, you know?

Probs time to whip out the ol' standard,

display dialog <variablename>

I have no idea what that means.

Insert lines like that into the applescript if you have suspicions about the contents of certain variables. I mean, it's just another variation on the ol' printf(var); trick used to "debug" languages w/o an IDE or a debugger.

you lost me at...

If you remind me later when I have access to a computer with InDesign, I'll see if I can combine 'em for ya.

I combined them fine...I just can't add bleed guides.

Man I love MacPorts

I guess I need to attach an antenna or something to my Airport Extreme. Should I get an antenna or a booster or what, and what kind, if so?

sonds obvious, but have you tried changing channel? I switched to 13 and speeds shot through the roof. But there's about 20 competing access points near me