Over at Teekay’s

Readers of this blog will know that I’m no big fan of MS Word (or indeed any of the other apps in the Office suite, with the possible exception of Excel) but that my work — editing, tracking changes, exchanging comments, and so forth — make my preferred solution (using Mellel, for example, or some flavor of LaTeX and outputting to PDF) cumbersome or simply impossible. I’m stuck with Word. But it’s increasingly driving me crazy with its stupid behavior. Case in point: I’ve been editing a file all morning that I received from one of our writers. I selected all and changed the formatting to “Normal,” which in my set-up means a 10pt Courier New.

I then changed the language to US English and set it to automatic spell check. All ready for editing! But then I made a huge mistake: I actually edited stuff. In the second-to-last graf I deleted an entire sentence, which prompted that graf to flow into the last one. Booom, the new graf changes to 12pt Times New Roman (a font I hate and never use) with the language selection blown out. I needed five steps — select the graf, change the font and font size, re-apply the language, and tell it to check spelling — just to be able to continue where I had left off. Why? Why???? WHY???????

David Lazarus explains in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle that it really doesn’t matter, or not to any normal people anyway, what chip a computer runs on — even if the little box in question is a Mac.

I agree in general and disagree in this specific case. The move to Intel — and so much has been written about it that I didn’t feel the need to comment until now — opens up a whole new world for Apple and secures the viability of its most basic component for many years to come, in a way that the traditional chipset just couldn’t. It will give consumers more choice and allow for faster, less power-hungry laptops. It does mattter.

But Lazarus’ point is slightly different. His piece exposes the ridiculous hype with which something as boring and basic as a new chip is greeted by talking to a bunch of people about the technology they’re using: a cop’s radio, a concierge’s phone, CDs, DVDs. And they’re all saying the same: they have no clue how it works and don’t care as long as it does. And the same applies to the Mac.

On my way out of the conference hall, I met 10-year-old Cambria Loose, who was exploring Macworld Expo with her mom because she’s got a new iPod and it’s totally cool.

I asked if she knew how her iPod works.

“It’s got all the little chips in it,” Loose said.

Right. But how does it work?

“I don’t know,” Loose said.

Then her face brightened. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “If it works, it’s fine.”

Mellel, the only mature competition to the ubiquitous Word on Mac that has just the right balance of power and simplicity, today reached version 2.0. (I know I’m gonna get flak for that statement but it’s true.) It’s a terrific little application and a real bargain — one of the very few pieces of software that I’ve never regretted buying. If you haven’t done so already, head over and grab an evaluation copy. And please pay for it if you decided to use it. (No, I don’t own their stock.)

It’ll take the boys at the stock exchange a few hours, or maybe a day or two, to realize what’s going on here (hence the dip in Apple’s stock), but Steve has done it again: just a few minutes ago he presented a new VideoPod with which Pixar shorts (CEO: Steve the Man) and music videos can be played, and output to TV (or a new iMac, which now has a remote and would replace any TV). But these movies cannot be burned — you need the Pod to play them. Stroke of genius! And, the iTunes Music Store offers TV series as of now. (No new PowerBooks though — the current line-up is getting a bit stale, especially after I dropped my 17″ at Stuttgart airport a few weeks ago.) There was a bit of disappointment on chatrooms such as fscklog and macprime, but I think it makes a lot of sense commercially — and the kids were happy once they heard they could get Desperate Housewives off the iTunes MS a day after it’s broadcast. (Only in the U.S. though.)

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Faithful readers of this blog, all two of them, will remember that one of the main reasons why I haven’t rearranged my entire workflow around LaTeX implementations or even Mellel is the fact that I often need to draft text with others, comment on other people’s work, or use Word’s track changes feature. In other words, I’m not an island unto myself. I collaborate with others.

This issue came up last week in a little project I’m involved in, where a group of four people need to draft one document. One of the participants suggested doing it the traditional way, by sending around Word documents as e-mail attachments. The other three agreed that that’s not the way to go, and we’re now setting up a Wiki for that purpose.

However, in recent months a whole bunch of collaborative environments have sprung up all over the place. There’s at least four that I’m aware of:

• Jotspot live
• Writeboard
• Writely
• gOFFICE

All of these, with the possible exception of gOFFICE whose webpage is so badly done that it’s impossible to get any meaningful information without signing up, allow several people to work on the same document; the doc is stored on their servers. No more track changes that someone forgot to turn on, no more person A editing draft X while person B works on draft Y. Neat and simple — except for the fact that you have to relinquish a level of control since your doc is on someone else’s server, and it might potentially be slow over a dialup connection. In fact, what happens when I’m in the middle of an editing session and the damn phone line dies? (I’m not saying that people designing such services should design them around people who have to rely on legacy technology. But it is a fact that especially in eastern and southeastern Europe most folks still dial up.)

Of these, unsurprisingly given their other products, Writeboard looks like the most thought-through and well-implemented. A very promising Open Source app that, howeverm, doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time yet is SynchroEdit.

All in all, without having truly tested any of the above services, this is an extremely welcome development.

Update: There’s an article on ZDNet about why web apps may replace desktop apps in the long run, with lots of links. Check it out.

Update 2: Check out this post and discussion over at the Read/Write Web.

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My favorite newspaper reports on a customer survey by Microsoft on the usability of MS Office. (The article is vague about where, if at all, this survey may be available and since I’m on the road I don’t have the time to chase it up.) The survey, according to the report, found that nine out of the ten most requested features for Office already exist in the most popular application suite. While Word 1.0 had around 100 features, the current version has around 1,500. Little wonder that users can’t find what they’re looking for, and are overwhelmed by what they do find.

MS Word is the workhorse for word processing on both the Windows and the Mac platform, and I use it all the time, but it is simply not a good application for anything beyond a few pages (in my experience, around 20 with footnotes) or anything that includes tables. Thankfully there are alternatives; on the Mac, my word processor of choice is Mellel, which is terrific and outputs to RTF, but for anything longer I would always use LaTeX (using the iTeXMac front end). Beware, however, of one tiresome problem: neither have any easy way for collaborative writing/editing, not even in an author/reviewer setup. (Short of using some sort of versioning control or outputting to PDF which can then be marked up with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this.)

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This is the faux-chirpy slap in the face a Mac user gets when trying to listen to WQXR, the classical-music station of the New York Times:

We’re sorry!
Your machine does not meet the minimum system requirements in order to download AOL Radio.
System Requirements
Operating System Hardware
-Windows 98 -A Pentium-class multimedia computer with a sound chip or dedicated sound card
-Windows ME -A 28.8kbps or faster internet connection (a connection speed of greater than 56k is recommended)
-Windows 2000 -A minimum of 5 MB of free disk space
-Windows XP -An Internet connection
Browser Versions
- IE 5.5 and above
- Netscape 7.1 and above (Note: Netscape 8 in Firefox mode is not currently supported. See below.)
- AOL 7.0 and above
Attention Firefox Users:
Currently AOL Radio does not support Firefox. Please come back next month, when Firefox support will be available.

Somebody recently told me a joke that the only product Microsoft could ever make that wouldn’t suck was a vacuum cleaner. I tend to agree.

I’m currently working on a project document for a client based on a previous document that wasn’t very expertly done. (Basically, no styles were used and no numbering — they just indented stuff manually and added numbers to it. Which is as well because it doesn’t screw up the formatting — or so one might’ve thought.) I did all the headings properly, marking them as “heading 1″ and “heading 2″ and so forth, without worrying about their formatting — I just wanted to get the logical structure right.

I added some text to each section, including some copy-and-paste, double-checked that the heading numbering was OK, saved and quit. When I re-opened the document a bit later, all the headings were screwed up.

So I created an empty document and just typed up the headings, initially without applying any styles. I then marked all headings at level 1 and assigned “heading 1″ to them and did the same with level-2 headings.

Same result: the numbering would just shift around, with some level-2 heds showing up as level 1. It drove me nuts, and I must’ve lost a full hour.

So I did something I never thought I’d do: I used Apple’s Pages. I had opened it once or twice before, decided it looked very nice and also pretty useless for my purposes because I don’t do page layout, just word processing. And guess what? It imports Word docs just fine and, more importantly, a doc with several levels of headings created in Pages can be exported to Word with the levels intact!

In other words, you need an Apple product to fix a functionality of a Microsoft product. Great!

Let me make this official: you haven’t read about this story on this blog because (i) you will have heard it from about 5,000 other sources, and (ii) I don’t give a damn. That’s right — I don’t care what kind of CPU sits in my little Mac as long as it gets the job done.

Apple “selling out” to the Wintel duopoly? C’mon, IBM –the supplier of the PowerPC chips — is hardly an underdog or iconoclast in the business, right? Hasn’t stopped Apple from building beautiful Macs and beautiful OSs and beautiful applications (and a few less beautiful ones, like the last iterations of AppleWorks), and Intel won’t stop it from doing the same for years to come.

Calm down, relax, move on.

Technorati Tags: Apple

Another one of my irreplaceable applications has just made a major step: iTeXMac, a front end to the immensely powerful LaTeX typesetting engine, is available in a preview 2 release.

I seem to be alone in this among the TeX folks, but I always much preferred this app to the more widespread TeXShop.

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The open-source OS X BibTeX editor BibDesk has reached version 1.0, after numerous 0. releases since February 2002. BibDesk makes bibliography management on the Mac a breeze and ties in with all LaTeX front ends. It’s a great piece of software. Thanks, Michael!

Technorati Tags: Apple

I just bought a Canon Pixma MP110 and am happy with it so far. What I’m *not* happy with is the ridiculous software installation progress on 10.4: at some point, no less than three installation applications are running; they put stupid aliases all over my desktop, which I hate; and they require you to restart your computer without indicating this at the beginning of the installation routine. Dude, what a crap piece of software!

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Merlin at 43 Folders talks about tools and how they relate to the art of getting things done. Tell me about it: tweaking iTeXMac was way more fun than tweaking my dissertation prospectus, and screwing around with Tiger also meant screwing around with some deadlines. He hits the nail on its head when he says,

there’s a big difference between buying new running shoes and actually hitting the road every morning.

Be that as it may, if you’re into tools and getting things done, head over to 43 Folders and check out the discussion unfolding on the running shoes post.

Technorati Tags: Apple

In the course of “developing” my e-mail strategy I did a quick and dirty information flow audit — we’re just talking stuff in zeroes and ones here, of course — stuff that “flows” through my little PowerBook or that sits there as “stock.”

I mentioned it was dirty, right? This is more of a support to my thinking than a clean, clear, and consistent conceptualization of anything. But it’s a pretty neat summary of what I do on my Mac — in fact, I could also assign average time values (e.g., hrs/day) to each application I use and each activity I undertake.

Anyway, here’s the result (produced in MyMind) — you’ll need to click on the picture below in order to actually read the little tags:

I’ve known for some time that I needed a better e-mail strategy.

Ever since my inbox count hit 10,000, to be precise.

That was last year, and I’ve gotten it down to 7,513 as of right now (before my “check all” schedule will kick in in about a minute and a half). Reason to be proud!

Let me explain my strategy up to date.

I keep everything in my inbox that needs action or review on my part. I know that once I file it into a subfolder (“ICTY/ICC/HR,” or “Serbia/SCG/Kosovo” — and don’t flame me over the spelling of the latter!) the message will be out of sight and out of mind, and other than turning up in a search I’m doing won’t ever come to my attention again.

At the same time I’m a busy person, so I defer a lot “for later.”

Not good.

So what I’m doing right now is importing a whole bunch of old mailboxes from Entourage (my primary e-mail client) to Mail.app (never used until now). I will use Entourage for ongoing work — reading and replying to e-mails — and Mail.app for archiving and retrieval.

Why is this better?

Because (a) my inbox gets leaner — fewer messages, fewer subfolders, which should also result in better responsiveness; (b) my archive is in a place where it can’t get corrupted by excessive ongoing operations; (c) I can establish a backup strategy that will make sure that both my bulky archive and my lean inbox are adequately safe (since backing up a 1.9 GB file like my present inbox is not something you do every day, even though I try); (d) I have different applications assigned to different activities, which makes it somehow conceptually cleaner. I also like Mail’s interface much better than Entourage’s, despite the fact that nobody else seems to like the new Tiger look, and Entourage, while generally a great mailing app, is crap slow when it searches for anything.

Am I crazy or does this make sense?

Sorry, fixed it. I’d forgotten that Growl, in addition to registering Entourage (my e-mail app), also needs a little Apple Script to be enabled from within Entourage. If all this doesn’t mean anything to you, please check out Growl and try it out. It’s one of those apps that you need to use in order to see its beauty and understand its utility.

Anyone know how to make Growl work again for Entourage under Tiger? Everything else works, but Entourage is the most important Growl item for me…

Another thing that’s broken: VLC tends to crash when you rewind or resize the window.

When I came home from Zürich on Friday, Tiger was waiting for me after Mrs. M-V had taken the cat in from the doorstep, where the DHL dude had left it (him?). (It’s that kind of town, where the mailman leaves stuff on your doorstep…)

Installation was a breeze, as always. I’ve always been among the early adopters and have never, ever gotten hit with the sort of thing that seems to routinely affect other folks. Maybe because I keep my HD in order and run the maintenance routines every once in a while and generally try not to have too much stuff — especially little shareware apps — lying around? Be that as it may, after an archive and install, Tiger was up and running — sloooowly, because Spotlight first needed to index all the files on my HD.

A number of people have commented that Spotlight will revolutionize the way we do business by eliminating, or almost eliminating, the need for hierarchical folders and similar Finder organization. It’s kind of like Gmail: with such powerful search abilities, why bother filing stuff in folders?

The hype is true.

I had experimented with such setups before, using DEVONthink as a repository (dump) for files, PDF files in particular, and relying on its ability to look into the full text of these files, putting them at my fingertip. I bought a license right away and am still happy with its ability to create semantic links between files, but I’m not happy about having to use a separate app for the purpose of file management (though of course the Finder is a separate app too, but it doesn’t feel that way).

I haven’t warmed to Dashboard yet — nice eye candy but not horribly useful.

Cool: the dictionary. It’s basically the New Oxford American, which contains gems like “This use of queer is now well established and widely used among gay people…” — but never mind. (And in case you were wondering, this is for a story I’m editing.)

Teekay goes to the online Apple store Germany to order Tiger for his wife, who doesn’t have a credit card but is a student and therefore entitled to an education discount. Teekay’s credit card billing address is in a neighboring country which shall remain unnamed, but his wife’s shipping address, of course, is in Germany. This *extremely complex situation* <sarcasm> is evidently too much for this technology-aware internet merchant to handle: the billing address doesn’t even *have* a field where one could list a country other than Germany.

This is no way to do business.

I now had to switch to a *bank transfer* — can you imagine? I can’t remember the last time I bought something via bank transfer…

Apple, please, fix this. This is ridiculous.

Speaking of fixing, I’m using *asterisks* for emphasis because ecto somehow decided it didn’t want to deal with my italics any more. Anyone has any clue how to fix this?

Tiger will be launched/loosened/set free/unleashed on the 29th. For the poor souls out there who have to deal with Windoze, Tiger’s the latest incarnation of Apple’s operating system X which has been running smoothly on my PowerBook G4 (15“ Titanium through 2003, when I passed it on to my wife when her Windoze machine bit the dust, from then on a 17” Aluminum) ever since it came out years ago. (The last drastic upgrade was Panther, which reached stores on 24 October 2003, our first wedding anniversary. We spent it queuing outside the Prince Street Apple Store, to celebrate. Dude passes by and asks, “what are you guys waiting for?” Teekay replies, voice trembling in excitement, “the new Mac operating system!” I had to admit that sounded, uh, really bad.)

In any case, I pre-ordered my copy (or rather, my wife pre-ordered hers, to take advantage of the educational discount — boy, my wife is doing *homework* right now!!!) couple days ago and can’t wait for the thing to arrive. I’m especially thrilled about Spotlight, which should make the file jungle on my hard drive slightly less impenetrable than it sometimes appears to me now.

Stay tuned for ongoing coverage. (Unfortunately, I have a lunch appointment in Zurich with a federal MP and the ex-boss of a big Swiss bank. Being busy with selling out I won’t be able to do what really counts and upgrade my little PowerBook.)