Forklift: Norton Commander for OS X

I've never used a file management tool on any OS as good as John Socha's Norton Commander for DOS. Nothing in OS/2, GeoWorks, Commodore, Windows 3, 95/98, NT, 2K, XP, MacOS, OS X, Palm etc. Others must agree, there've been clones for years, including clones of clones by people who don't remember the original (FileCommander for OS/2 came closest to the original).

Norton Commander was like Symantec's MORE 3.1 or GrandView -- software so good it cannot be adequately replicated. NC even has a fan pages and an official history. It was the progenitor of what's now called an "orthodox file manager" (OFM).

So when TUAW wrote about a "dual pane" file manager for OS X I had to investigate. TUAW's writers are too young to recall NC, so they didn't mention it, but indeed ForkLift ($30) is an NC clone for OS X. They even use tabs to switch panes. There's no command line (odd omission really), but the Spotlight integration is well done and substitutes for NC's marvelous NCD command, no tree views, and sadly there's no real equivalent to the NC Alt-F10/NCD functionality (see below). (Now if only Microsoft would remember that search strings need to execute against folders...)

Will I get it? $30 is quite a bit for something like this, I think they should have gone for $20. It feels like a starting point rather than a finished solution -- there are no tree views for example. Still, I'll try it for a week and see ...

Update 6/3/07: Alt-F10. That's what they're missing. That would make this worth $30, its absence makes this worth $10. Sometime in the evolution of NC, perhaps even NC 5, Symantec integrated NCD/Norton Change Directory (esp. see WCD) into Norton Commander. Tap Alt-F10, and the currently active pane was replaced with a tree view of the disk directory structure. Type a few characters and the view switched to the first match. Tap a quick key to move to the next match, always in the context of the tree. Hit Enter to switch the pane to the selected directory.

Brilliant. Nobody has done it better. This was post John Socha I believe; true genius in software requires multiple contributors working around a shared theme and vision.

The Forklift team ought to be able to leverage Spotlight and Cocoa to provide the indices and tree views, so much of the heavy lifting would be done for them.

I doubt they'll do it, but I'll send them a comment.

Incidentally, speaking of parts of the later NC that everyone's forgotten, there's NC Mail/NCMail. Symantec bundled the most efficient email app I've ever used with NC in the waning days of DOS. It was plain, but it was hyper-efficient.

Fast user switching and automated software updates: The complexity problem

One of the more obvious issues with modern software is that system complexity has evolved more quickly than system repair and recovery mechanisms. The rules of biological evolution don't fully apply, at least in the near term, to computer systems.

Multi user accounts, on both OS X and XP, illustrate this. Today my Firefox update failed with a cryptic message on my XP box. It said a file was in use and could not be replaced. I checked my processes and didn't see anything. Logging out didn't help. Downloading the full executable and reinstalling didn't help.

Right. Firefox was running in another account, indeed the Firefox Update was running in the other account -- and it was stalled there too. The Firefox installed Google toolbar process was running in both user instances as well.

Ideally the Mozilla installer, or the underlying OS, would detect this state and provide a meaningful error message.

One day ...

Windows Live Writer blog authoring client is in beta 2

The announcement is here. My favorite blogging tool has had a big update - and it's still "beta". I especially appreciate the Sharepoint 2007 support and the "paste special" options. No mention of Firefox support, unsurprisingly. IE only, Windows only, etc.

Alas, the Sharepoint integration suggests Microsoft won't kill this product. Live Writer will kill every other Windows blog authoring tool on the market, I suspect it's already finished off BlogJet. There's nothing as good on OS X; that's particularly disturbing.

Update: A local tech column reveals WLW has Minnesota roots. The chief architect "J.J. Allaire, is a Macalester College graduate and a former Minnesota tech entrepreneur". I live just south of Macalester ...

Update 6/2/07: I thought I used to be able to view and act on prior blogger posts using WLW. The update information claims I can edit in the blog and in WLW and WLW will manage versioning. Neither of these are working for me today.

Update 6/15/07: Duh. You can download the lasts 500 posts easily from any blog, and then, like this one, edit it in WLW. Just use the File Open menu. I had to be told this by one of the product architects after asking for this "feature" on his blog. In retrospect this is how the prior version worked. Just another sign of dementia. After weeks of regular use the only complaint I have is that it takes a while startup on first use on my system. This is one beautiful product! There's nothing like it in the OS X world, Microsoft is trouncing Apple here.

Update 7/25/07: There's a Firefox extension for Live Writer. It didn't work when I tried it last December, but it's been working perfectly for the past month.

UI Design: start with your grid

I built quite a few user interfaces around HTML table tags in the old, old days. I actually like HTML tables -- they were very clever about self-arrangement if you thought about the problem correctly.

So I was receptive to this CH article: Coding Horror: Let's Build a Grid. It's a great brief introduction to thinking about grid layout in an UI. Lots of graphics and valuable links.

Foleo: Hawkins peculiar extension to the mobile phone

Hawkins designed the original (since debased) PalmPilot as an extension to the PC rather than a Newtonish replacement for a PC, now he's imaging the Linux-based Foleo as an extension to a phone (emphases mine):

Hands-On with the Palm Foleo: More Cool Features - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

... To respond, you need to be near a Wi-Fi spot or use the smart phone as a modem via its Bluetooth connection, which is why Hawkins calls Foleo a mobile companion and emphasizes the role of the smart phone in this type of digital lifestyle.

... It weighs about 2.4 pounds but feels much lighter, and even with its small battery it can deliver five full hours (even while using Wi-Fi the entire time). The large screen supports 1024-by-600 or 1024-by-768 VGA resolution. Navigation is done through a TrackPoint nub in the keyboard and it has a roller wheel below the keyboard to provide fast and easy scrolling. Foleo's price at launch will be $499 and it should be on the market by mid-summer.

... Foleo would give them a light, lower-cost option that could make it easy to hit the road without a laptop. But, whether planned or not, Hawkins may have actually hit on a more powerful mobile-computing idea. Since this is a small, lightweight Linux computer, it could eventually become a new stand-alone portable-computing platform that the Linux or open-source crowd embraces...

I don't get it. You can't put it in your pocket and it weighs and costs about as much as an XP laptop, but it doesn't replace a laptop. I assume it uses Flash instead of a hard drive. It sports an OS that corporate IT types will never accept (i.e. not Microsoft). It reminds me of the legendary Tandy 100 (I think that was the number -- the original road warrior palmtop), the numerous failed WinCE palmtops, the very shortlived Newton portable, the never-released PenPoint device ...

I just don't get it. A computing/email/browser extension for something like the hideous Motorola RAZR makes sense, but this isn't it. Either Hawkins has lost it or there's another part of the puzzle we don't know about ...

Update 6/2/07: Stross says there's another part of the puzzle. He claims it's a covert web 2.0 network computer device, Larry Ellison's old dream made real. I hate to think Hawkins has lost it, so I hope Stross is right. I still can't see it working within Palm's life expectancy however.

Update 6/4/07: Still trying to figure out how the Foleo makes sense. It makes very little sense by itself. What, however, if the Foleo enabled Palm to produce something like the iPhone?

via Brighthand

... Since that announcement, Palm's Jeff Hawkins told CNET that because the Foleo gives smartphone users the option of full-sized keyboard, then it might no longer be necessary for the Treo to have its own smaller one.

I don't want to reveal too much. But I can now think through the problem differently. I can think through tradeoffs. Well, if I have something with a bigger screen and a keyboard -- whether it looks like this (Foleo) or something else -- where I can view and manipulate data, does it change how I design this guy (pointing to Treo)? Yes.

Hawkins also suggested that Treo with larger screens or smaller form factors might also be possible.

Now it sounds like a multimedia Linux Palm/phone with an external Linux screen/keyboard option. The first part of the equation sounds a lot like an iPhone, but Apple hasn't yet announced its plans for an external screen/keyboard. This is something I used to ask about eons ago (on usenet actually); it makes sense to me.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16: a handy but costly tool for old-timers

The big news for the venerable $83 MacLink Plus 16 file format translator is read-only support for Office 2007 documents. There's still no support for OpenOffice/StarOffice open file formats, which is disappointing. It's also still a Rosetta application, running in emulation on Intel Macs. That's not too surprising considering the age of the code-base; version 6 came out in 1991 and I first started using it @ 1986. Looking at the release dates it seems to have been on hiatus since 2004, that suggests it was brought back from the dead recently.

There's no way to download a trial version. That's particularly worrisome given the age of the codebase -- does it really run safely on new machines? There's also no support for presentation software, such as PowerPoint - a viewer would be much appreciated! Symantec MORE 3.1 is not supported (Brad's site still has his 1999 MORE2XML converter and this dated page describes other options.)

So, is there any reason to be interested? Microsoft, for example, supplies free Office 2007 converters and I think NeoOffice and the soon-to-be native OpenOffice will open those documents. Heck, I expect the new version of my favored Nisus Writer will do it as well, not to mention a future update to Google Docs. Why spend $83?!

The only good reason can be support for very old file formats. MacWrite, WordPerfect, etc (but not, for example, Volkswriter and all those long forgotten apps of the early PC era). If you're an old-timer converting to the Mac this application probably makes sense. I'd be tempted if they offered a demo version I could hammer on for a month or so. I don't trust DataViz quite enough to buy a non-universal app without a trial ...

Apple Mail plug-in roundup

Apple Mail plug-in roundup - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is a handy reference. I don't use any at this time, but most of my mail is still in an ancient Eudora archive ...