Atwood: why we don't miss Microsoft Streets and Trips

There are some applications that don't exist for OS X. One of the biggest omissions is quality speech recognition, but another is maps. There's nothing on the map like Microsoft Streets and Trips, even though S&T has been getting slower and buggier over the past two to three years.

I used to miss that application, though I became accustomed to its absence. Google Maps, and Google Earth, eased my pain -- except when I was on an airplane.

Now Jeff Atwood tells me I don't need to miss Microsoft Streets and Trips any more. His head-to-head real world testing demonstrates Google Maps is substantially faster and more usable than MS&T. Not merely comparable, but absolutely better. Also free, and it runs just fine on Camino/Firefox (Safari? What's that?).

I actually don't care that much (yet) about speech recognition on my desktop, so if Jobs today introduces OS X remote control functionality even 80% as good as Windows' ancient terminal services/RDP functionality the day of the PC will have truly passed.

Macintouch review: audio noise in the new MacBook Pro

Thankfully we have Macintouch to warn us about these product design defects...

Macintouch Review: MacBook Pro (15" LED)

... Noise from the headphone port (first identified by a MacInTouch reader) is a real problem, which has three components, as we confirmed with sound-isolating headphones:

First, a very quiet hiss is present whenever the laptop is awake with headphones plugged in. It's on the same scale as the hiss we noted in the aluminum iPod Shuffle, so many people will never notice it.

A greater problem is a quiet but ubiquitous static. It is present only when the audio circuitry is working, and ceases within a second of pausing iTunes or QuickTime player. It is easily masked by music but shows itself during quiet passages.

The last component is an intermittent high-pitched noise. We've heard four distinct pitches, but never more than one at a time; it varies from a high tone to a faint whine. It goes away within five or six seconds of pausing iTunes; we believe this is when the audio circuitry turns off to save power. We cannot consistently cause the high pitched noise to happen, nor affect the pitch. We cannot trigger it with hard drive activity, spin-up or spin-down, display or keyboard brightness, or display activity. We assume it is caused by interference from other components within the machine.

These audio problems probably can't be solved without a hardware redesign, which is disappointing, given Apple's previous audio quality. If audio playback (or recording) is critical to your work, you'll need something like an external USB or FireWire audio interface...

A significant step backwards! The complexity of these RF environments must be daunting. I wonder if we'll eventually need to move the (power-demanding!) D/A converters to the headphones or stereo systems, so there's no analog output from the complex RF environment of the laptop ...

TidBITS reviews OS X remote control software

One of the things that keeps me from being a complete Mac head is Microsoft's remote desktop protocol vs. OS X's ... ummm... uhhhh.

It's pathetic. OS X does have some hooks for a raster based unix remote screen control application, but it's stone age compared to Microsoft's iron age RDP. My best explanation for the absence of useful remote desktop control is that OS X users simply aren't interested. Once again I am reminded that a Vulcan's life is a lonely one...

Supposedly 10.5 includes some iChat remote control for remote maintenance. In the meantime we have CoPilot (works, but very slow -- useful only for remote support) and a variety of costly products that may or may not work. Now TidBITS reports one more option: LogMeIn for OS X is in beta. This product works quite well for Windows, so if the beta news isn't too bad I might give it a try.

Google public calendars: inline skating in the Twin Cities

Google has expanded their public calendar offerings with new search facilities and better support for adding public events to personal calendars.

I decided to give it a whirl by creating a public calendar for Minneapolis and Saint Paul Inline Skating (Minnesota). Currently it holds only events from the Minnesota Inline Skate Club and for the Twin Cities Friday Night Skate.

I was motivated to give it a whirl after a memorable skate through Minneapolis last night. I don't get out very often (yearly, basically) and I barely recognized the den of debauchery across the river. (My home town of Saint Paul is more sedate.) The Guthrie seems to have been transported from Manhattan, and the skate into the city across the Stone Arch bridge is now a first rate experience. I particularly enjoyed skating the spiral hill by the Guthrie, and I am oddly fond of skating around the dealers of Hennepin. They mostly seem to find us an amusing distraction. Slaloming through Loring Park in the moonlight is not to be missed, and we end with a skate along the Nicollet mall, waving to the diners.

Alas, the group has shrunk over the years and we're mostly, to put it delicately, beyond the carding range. (That may explain why the dealers find us amusing.) I'll give some of the free "meet-up" type sites, and Google's public calendar, a try and see if we can get some new folks. Unfortunately the Friday night skates are every 2nd and 4th Friday, which has always struck me as odd. It's too weird a schedule for most folks to be able to track, I'd prefer the group try every Friday but I'm strictly a passenger.

Update: Just for the heck of it, I added an entry on eventful.com. So now a search on inline skating in the twin cities lists this event. The odd schedule is again an awkward fit.

Google's blogger widget

Google has an OS X widget for creating blogger posts. I'm using it to create this post.

It's cute. It's also worthless.

That's why you've never heard of it.

Google Reader goes offline with Google Gears

I've been a longtime Bloglines user, but if I were starting over I'd probably be using Google Reader. It's just that Bloglines was good before GR was. Recently, however, I've been annoyed by feeds being "silent" for days, then appearing with 100 posts. That's rude.

Now I've got one more reason to consider the big switch:

Official Google Blog: Feeds on a plane!

With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing...

... Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.

To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

What I really want is an offline drastically improved version of Google's "BlogThis!" bookmarklet.

In the meantime, everyone's been commenting on Google Gears, but there hasn't been much emphasis on how it works. From the original announcement:

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Gears for WebKit

... Google Gears ... adds support for local data storage and helps web application developers manage resources so you can make your web application work offline. It is currently available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh platforms and you can learn more at http://gears.google.com....

.... Google Gears for WebKit is made up of an Internet plugin for Webkit or Safari (Gears.plugin) that's installed into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and an InputManager (GoogleGearsEnabler) that's installed into /Library/InputManagers. The GoogleGearsEnabler ensures that Google Gears can provide resources to web applications. It registers a NSURLProtocol class only if the OS X Application is a supported version of Safari or WebKit. Once installed, the registered class will check any URL requests to see if Google Gears can provide the content. If so, it will intercept the call and provide the data. Otherwise, the URL will be processed normally. This is how Google Gears is able to work when you're not connected to the Internet.

Google Gears is an open source project and we're working with partners like Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and others to make sure this is the right solution for users....

Note from the description that Google Gears, once in place, works all the time. So it has the not insignificant side-effect of dramatically decreasing some web traffic. In this regard it reminds me of some of the technologies currently built into IE 7 [1]. Google Gears is providing a similar application foundation universally.

[1] Incidentally, earlier versions of IE made a big deal about being able to browser pages offline. Those were the days of intermittent connectivity ...

MarsEdit: how not to distribute software

MarsEdit is a blog editor for OS X. In the XP world Microsoft's free Live Writer has crushed the competition, but the OS X world is wide open. MarsEdit should have a niche. I'm the perfect candidate for them since I blog a lot, prefer to use dedicated editors and I buy software. Happily. When I know it's good.

I downloaded MarsEdit and tried to run it. Nope, my trial has expired. I'd tried an earlier version, years ago, and it clearly wasn't ready for use. Apparently, that's all the trial I'll ever get.

This is so dumb it's sad. Each significant update, at the very least, should have a renewed trial period. Best of all:

1. New trial period for each major release.
2. Trial period is 30 uses, not 15 days.
3. After end of trial period can still try the app again, but now it's limited -- so you you can test it but not exploit it.

I'm still waiting for someone to clone Microsoft's Live Writer ...

Update 6/6/07: Hoisted from the comments:

For now, if you're still interested in giving it another spin, you should be able to get a fresh start by removing the Application Support and Preferences file for MarsEdit:
[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit
and
[Home] -> Library -> Preferences -> com.ranchero.marsedit.plist

I'll give it another try!

Update 6/11/07: The good news is I was able to try it out, and it did an excellent job fetching blogger posts. The lesser bad news is that you can't save as draft to blogger, drafts are local to the file system. The bigger bad news is that it's not a wysiwyg editor, it's an html editor that doesn't emulate paragraphs. For my purposes Camino with Blogger's native editing controls is a better option.