The real iMovie '08 is Final Cut Express 4

iMove '08 should have been called iClip 1.0. It clearly wasn't an upgrade from iMovie HD, it was a new product.

At the time I wrote:

Gordon's Tech: Apple's iClip 1.0 (iMovie '08) shaft: what they should have done

...The honorable thing for Apple to have done would have been to provide iMovie HD users with an upgrade path to Final Cut Express (which might also require some updates to FCE, I'm not sure how serious Apple is about that product)...

Well, Apple didn't do the honorable thing for iMovie HD users, but the new Final Cut Express is out. Users of iMovie HD should probably forego the iLife 2008 update and buy FCE 4 instead.

I'd give them points if they were to provide a $100 upgrade path for users of iMovie HD, but I admit that would pretty hard to police. The new product is $200, so heavy users of iMovie HD will probably pay up.

Safari 3: very cool tech

Safari 3 is even more impressive than I'd realized: Surfin’ Safari: Ten New Things in WebKit 3.

Faster - esp. JavaScript. Less memory. More capabilities. Fewer bugs. SVG support (not fully optimized).

I'm going to test it with Blogger and Google Docs, Safari 3 beta didn't work too well there.

OS X 10.4.11: Macintouch reports and an update procedure

My policy on these bug fix updates is to wait a few days and check both the Macintouch Reader Reports: OS X 10.4.11 and the Apple Discussion List.

I follow a simple subset of Gruber's update procedure:

1. Download the full cumulative update from Apple's site.
2. Shut down and disconnect all external drives.
3. Restart into my admin account (very plain account).
4. Install update, don't run anything until it's done.
5. Restart into my regular account.

I don't do an extra backup but I do check that my nightly backup completed correctly. If I'm feeling paranoid I do a test restore of a single randomly selected file.

There has been a longstanding bug with Apple's Updater (note, however, I have removed unsanity's application program enhancer from all my machines). There's a low but non-zero probability that it will botch an update; the probability rises sharply if you're doing anything during the update process or if another users is logged on at the same time. The restart reduces that risk substantially, as does the plain admin account.

I don't repair privileges. Everyone I read feels that's pointless.

Since I have no recognized problems with OS X 10.4.10 I'm in no great hurry to update*.

*iPhoto 7.1 is crashy. I hope the combination of 10.4.11 and iPhoto 7.11 will help.

Update 11/15/07: Some hints in Apple's release notes and user experiences suggest 10.4.11 may have the same trouble with input manager hacks (application program enhancer mostly) as 10.5 has. I recommend checking for APE as described in the APE uninstall guidelines. Then uninstall it.

After the update, if you absolutely can't live without APE, do your research prior to reinstalling the very latest version.

Bento and the iPhone

FileMaker has discontinued FileMaker Mobile

As of the end of the business day, December 19, 2007, FileMaker, Inc. will no longer sell FileMaker Mobile.

That's a serious drag, because a database client for the iPhone is one of my high priority requirements.

On the other hand, FM has introduced the mysterious 10.5 only Bento "personal database" app:

Meet Bento — Learn More

... Bento is designed exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It takes advantage of many of the new features of Leopard, including live linking to iCal data, core animation, advanced find, Time Machine backups, and multimedia features...

So will there by a companion iPhone application for Bento?

In the meantime, I'll be holding off on FileMaker updates. In fact, I'll be holding off on all Apple purchases until I see the iPhone SDK and the rumored major iPhone update in Feb 2008. Apple's strategy is simply murky ...

Safari: Ok, you win

I really thought Safari's web rendering engine was doomed, though I noted some caveats.

Ok, so even I can be wrong. Yes, I still use Firefox (kind of got away from Camino, though I use it on slower machines), but clearly WebKit is a winner.

The iPhone has established WebKit compatibility as a must-have for most web sites, but the use of WebKit in the Android platform has finished the deal.

This is from the Safari WebKit blog:

...Many of you have seen the announcement of the Android Mobile Platform (www.openhandsetalliance.com) followed by today’s release of the SDK (code.google.com/android). We (Android) were happy to highlight the use of the WebKit engine as the rendering core for Android’s browser. We have been working on our mobile implementation of WebKit for quite some time. A few changes that we made to WebKit, which make it more suitable for mobile devices, have been submitted to the Tip Of Tree prior to the release of the SDK...

Another interesting change we made, which is not mobile specific, was to make the canvas tag platform independent. Again we are working on migrating this to SVN.
Most changes made to WebKit are clearly identified with a #ifdef ANDROID_[feature name]...

Canvas is the drawing environment for applications in WebKit. Knowing little, I think of it as "QuickDraw for the web".

Making Canvas "platform independent" sounds interesting.

Anyway, sorry WebKit. I was wrong, you were right.

If Google changes their Docs and Blogger sites to work better with Safari, I might even switch back. (Safari editing in Blogger causes a tag mess in the output.)

Update: See the comments for a persuasive explanation of what Canvas does and it's relation to Quartz. I'd been using "QuickDraw" as a metaphor rather than a technology, but it's very nice to get more background.

Incidentally, I write this blog primarily as a way to create notes for my own learning and reference, and secondarily as a way to "give back" to the net. I get enormous help from people who share knowledge freely, this blog is a small way to share what I know, and sometimes what I think (I mostly put opinion elsewhere).

I assumed readership would only come incidentally, as the result of a Google Search to solve a specific problem I'd written about.

Somehow, for reasons that are unclear to me, I seem to have acquired some rather knowledgeable readers. It's an unexpected pleasure.

Lunarpages: a sign of the end-times for low end hosting solutions?

My blogs are posted through Google's Blogger, and they've been very reliable for months.

My older web pages however, and several domains, are hosted by Lunarpages. Lunarpages is a low-end to mid-range hosting provider with an above average reputation. I've used them for years and I've been reasonably satisfied.

They're not doing so well lately. They've been down 3 times in the past 10 days, and they've been offline all day today. Only their forums are working. Even several Google Apps domains, where Lunarpages only does redirects, are unavailable because the redirects have failed.

My guess is it's some kind of denial-of-service attack on their DNS servers. The worst part of it is they're maintaining complete radio silence -- no postings at all on their network status. Since their entire domain is unreachable I think that merits a comment or two.

Google has the technical team and infrastructure to handle a pretty massive BOT attack. Lunarpages clearly doesn't. I wonder if that vulnerability is going to wipe out the low end internet services market -- leaving only the big players.

I'll have to start moving off of Lunarpages. It'll take quite a while, but I'll start by moving my domains to the service Google uses for the Google Apps domains I have. The last step will be finding a new home for my legacy web pages.

Update 11/14/07: It looks like this was two problems. Lunarpages had been failing due to DNS attacks, but the failure of the past week was a routing problem with the service my Hotel was using. I didn't have time to debug the routing problem, so I can't say who was ultimately responsible.

Terrific review of Google Search 2007 - power user techniques

I hadn't realized how much personalization of search results Google does now. No wonder I can find my own blog material so easily!

Biases and Restrictions in Google Search:

...5. If you don't like Google's personalized results you can log out from your Google account, disable the Web History service or turn off the personalization bias by adding &pws=0 to Google's URL. Note that the parameter is not persistent and it only works for the current search.

6. To restrict your search to the high-quality (?) web sites included in the Open Directory Project, you can append &cat=gwd/Top to Google's URL or perform your search at Google Directory...

There's lots more. It's definitely worth studying this and keeping a link to the reference.

I tried the &pws=0 parameter when searching for my own stuff, and it was neat to see the search results change. It wasn't a large change, but in general my stuff moved down the main page one step.