In the course of closing out the last remaining RSS reader options for an unusual setting, I put Safari for Windows through some simple tests as an RSS reader.
Wow, it's bad.
No, the RSS stuff is pretty good. Much better than Firefox 3, and probably comparable to IE 7.
Problem is, the was very flaky and slow to process the Sharepoint and Community Server feeds I gave it. If it clicked too many times during operations on the bookmarks and feeds it would crash.
I can see why Safari gets so little attention on XP. On OS X it's a reasonably competitive browser (I prefer Firefox because Google builds for FF), but on XP it's kind of bad.
Really, Apple should kill Safari on XP and focus on getting Webkit based Chrome working with Apple products.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
RIP Onfolio - the last of the standalone XP feed readers
In my workplace we live in a time warp of Office 2003 and IE 6 running on XP. I doubt we're the only ones.
So we need older solutions for Sharepoint 2007 RSS subscriptions; solutions with integrated Windows authentication. Products like Newsgator Inbox, Omea Pro, and Onfolio.
These are products that have been ground into the dust by Outlook 2007 and IE 7. (Neither of which are comparable to Google Reader, but we're talking corporate settings here. The IE 7 reader, by the way, is much better than the Firefox native reader.)
Newsgator Inbox recently failed my personal quality tests. Not their problem necessarily, Outlook 2003 is a terrible place to operate in.
Omea Pro is way too big and complicated to contemplate for our users and environment. It would be like using an aircraft carrier for water skiing.
That leaves old Onfolio
I have used Onfolio at work for years, and I've been happy with it ... but it was clear Microsoft didn't want a 3rd feed reader (after IE 7 and Outlook 2007).
Now it's gone entirely ...
RIP Onfolio. Sniff. You were good software.
So that leaves ... nothing at all.
Update 9/17/08: Not quite nothing. Peter C, a colleague of mine, reminded me of Sage RSS reader for Firefox. I used Sage four years ago (Google custom search, my memory lives upon you) but had forgotten about it. It's come a long way, and is still actively maintained. Firefox does not use the Windows authentication framework, so users will be asked for their passwords the first time authentication fails on a domain. The password is stored for the domain. So with each password change our users will see this dialog once for our Sharepoint sites. Not too bad as a holding measure until we get to IE 7 or Outlook 2007.
Update 3/12/09: Sage really didn't work for us, far too weak a feed reader. I tried Omea Reader, but it's also abandoned. So there's still nothing out there ...
So we need older solutions for Sharepoint 2007 RSS subscriptions; solutions with integrated Windows authentication. Products like Newsgator Inbox, Omea Pro, and Onfolio.
These are products that have been ground into the dust by Outlook 2007 and IE 7. (Neither of which are comparable to Google Reader, but we're talking corporate settings here. The IE 7 reader, by the way, is much better than the Firefox native reader.)
Newsgator Inbox recently failed my personal quality tests. Not their problem necessarily, Outlook 2003 is a terrible place to operate in.
Omea Pro is way too big and complicated to contemplate for our users and environment. It would be like using an aircraft carrier for water skiing.
That leaves old Onfolio
I have used Onfolio at work for years, and I've been happy with it ... but it was clear Microsoft didn't want a 3rd feed reader (after IE 7 and Outlook 2007).
Now it's gone entirely ...
Windows Live GalleryHere's the death warrant. Even the old Onfolio domain, www.onfolio.com, redirects there.
... Sorry, there's nothing that matches your search in any item's title, description, or tags. Try using different or fewer search terms to get more results. If you still can't find what you need, share your ideas in Gallery forums so others can create it....
RIP Onfolio. Sniff. You were good software.
So that leaves ... nothing at all.
Update 9/17/08: Not quite nothing. Peter C, a colleague of mine, reminded me of Sage RSS reader for Firefox. I used Sage four years ago (Google custom search, my memory lives upon you) but had forgotten about it. It's come a long way, and is still actively maintained. Firefox does not use the Windows authentication framework, so users will be asked for their passwords the first time authentication fails on a domain. The password is stored for the domain. So with each password change our users will see this dialog once for our Sharepoint sites. Not too bad as a holding measure until we get to IE 7 or Outlook 2007.
Update 3/12/09: Sage really didn't work for us, far too weak a feed reader. I tried Omea Reader, but it's also abandoned. So there's still nothing out there ...
Monday, September 15, 2008
Does our family really need an OS X spreadsheet?
We don't have a spreadsheet for our OS X machines. Sure, I could install Microsoft Office, but I'm not all that fond of Excel - and it's overkill for most of our family. Besides, it includes Word which I despise, and PowerPoint which I prefer to forget.
Running office is why I have VMWare Fusion -- I'd rather keep it off our Macs.
That leaves Google Spreadsheets, which we use extensively. That works for most things, but, for some odd reason unconnected to echoes of 1929, Emily wanted a way to review our investments. We're not quite ready to expose them to Google (which was recently found guilty of an astoundingly bone-headed security screw-up).
The data lived in a spreadsheet in our old XP box [1], so at first I thought it was time to get a Mac spreadsheet. There are a few options in addition to Excel ...
That left Mariner Calc, Numbers, and maybe Tables. Of these I'd probably opt for either Numbers (get Pages and Keynote for free) or Mariner Calc (simplest, fastest, most tested, great vendor). If they save as .xls I could still use Excel from the XP box for editing of the iMac served file.
Still, it's a lot of bother to buy and install a desktop app given that we use Google Spreadsheets so much and that we so rarely need one.
That's when I remembered FileMaker Pro - version 8 (!). Yes, old version. Still works on 10.5, though if you don't have web sharing disabled the first startup is very long. I have it on my XP machine and our Macs, so it's cross-platform. It's easy to create a mini-app with running totals, filters, search, links to our FileMaker password file, security, simplified menus, etc.
I don't have to do it all at once, the beauty of FileMaker is I can import the spreadsheet, make a few tweaks, and evolve from there. Bento can probably do something simpler in a similar way.
Between FileMaker Pro (Bento?) and Google Spreadsheet we might be able to go a very long time without a true OS X spreadsheet. In the unlikely event that my daughters early enthusiasm for math persists, we might end up with Mathematica or MathCad rather than Excel ...
[1] I used Quicken 2.0 -- and almost every Windows version since - as well as 4 years on Mac Classic versions. Somewhere between 1997 and 2005 Intuit's quality hit rock bottom. I still use Quicken and the quality may be improved now, but really I don't have time for it anymore. Intuit killed my enthusiasm some years ago.
It was never all that friendly for anyone but a regular user anyway. We make do with the simplest possible approach -- we have too much complexity everywhere else.
Running office is why I have VMWare Fusion -- I'd rather keep it off our Macs.
That leaves Google Spreadsheets, which we use extensively. That works for most things, but, for some odd reason unconnected to echoes of 1929, Emily wanted a way to review our investments. We're not quite ready to expose them to Google (which was recently found guilty of an astoundingly bone-headed security screw-up).
The data lived in a spreadsheet in our old XP box [1], so at first I thought it was time to get a Mac spreadsheet. There are a few options in addition to Excel ...
Pure Mac: Spreadsheets - Software for MacintoshI don't have the time to mess with anything but very reliable products, so based on my personal experience that ruled out most of the open source options. We already have AppleWorks (works on 10.5), but the fonts look ugly with 10.5 and it is pretty darned old.
AppleWorks
Excel
icExcel
Mariner Calc
Mesa
NeoOffice
Numbers
OpenOffice
Papyrus
Ragtime
Tables
That left Mariner Calc, Numbers, and maybe Tables. Of these I'd probably opt for either Numbers (get Pages and Keynote for free) or Mariner Calc (simplest, fastest, most tested, great vendor). If they save as .xls I could still use Excel from the XP box for editing of the iMac served file.
Still, it's a lot of bother to buy and install a desktop app given that we use Google Spreadsheets so much and that we so rarely need one.
That's when I remembered FileMaker Pro - version 8 (!). Yes, old version. Still works on 10.5, though if you don't have web sharing disabled the first startup is very long. I have it on my XP machine and our Macs, so it's cross-platform. It's easy to create a mini-app with running totals, filters, search, links to our FileMaker password file, security, simplified menus, etc.
I don't have to do it all at once, the beauty of FileMaker is I can import the spreadsheet, make a few tweaks, and evolve from there. Bento can probably do something simpler in a similar way.
Between FileMaker Pro (Bento?) and Google Spreadsheet we might be able to go a very long time without a true OS X spreadsheet. In the unlikely event that my daughters early enthusiasm for math persists, we might end up with Mathematica or MathCad rather than Excel ...
[1] I used Quicken 2.0 -- and almost every Windows version since - as well as 4 years on Mac Classic versions. Somewhere between 1997 and 2005 Intuit's quality hit rock bottom. I still use Quicken and the quality may be improved now, but really I don't have time for it anymore. Intuit killed my enthusiasm some years ago.
It was never all that friendly for anyone but a regular user anyway. We make do with the simplest possible approach -- we have too much complexity everywhere else.
Stack Overflow: a brave new take on supporting software developers
I don’t code, but I’m a frequent customer of sites that claim to support software developers. I can vouch for Joel Spolsky’s critique of existing sites – and it’s a critique that applies to technical support sites in general. Lots of options, quality low, extinction rate high, spam attacks severe.
Between Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and their friends and supporters, this one has a chance to be different. It uses a combination of private funding with a community wiki and voting/reputation management infrastructure.
I’ll be adding it to the top of my custom search engines (every software person needs a custom search engine). Here’s Joel on the service (emphases mine) …
Stack Overflow Launches - Joel on Software
You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:
- A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
- A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
- An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
- And something in Japanese.
If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck….
Well, technology has gotten better since those discussion forums were set up. I thought that the programming community could do better by combining the idea of a Q&A site with voting and editing.
Would it work? I had no idea. And it looked like there was no way to find out, because everyone at Fog Creek was really busy so nobody had any time to build this.
Then, out of the blue, Jeff Atwood called me up. His own blog, Coding Horror, was starting to rack in the dough, and he was trying to figure out if that meant he could quit his day job and just blog.
Pattern-matching rules fired in my brain. The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience (#15 on Bloglines) and Jeff’s (#89) would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day one. So Jeff and I decided to go in together on this.
… After a very short, five-week private beta, we’re opening Stack Overflow to the public today…
… Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.
Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.
Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.
Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.
Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers….
… There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.
You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.
Want to know an easy way to earn reputation? Find a question somewhere with several good, but incomplete, answers. Steal all the answers and write one long, complete, detailed answer which is better than the incomplete ones. Sit back and earn points while people vote up your comprehensive answer.
In addition to voting on answers, you can vote on questions. Vote up a question if you think it’s interesting, if you’d like to know the answer, or if you think it’s important. The hot tab on the home page will show some of the highest-ranked recent questions using an algorithm similar to digg or Reddit. If you’re generally interested in programming and want to learn something new every day, visit the hot tab frequently.
Want to test your knowledge? Visit the Unanswered tab. Right now, you just see a list of questions with no answers (and there are very few), but in the near future, we’ll actually tailor the list to show you questions that we think you have a chance of answering, based on questions you’ve successfully answered in the past.
We have tags. Every question is tagged so, for example, if you’re a Ruby guru, you can ignore everything but Ruby and just treat Stack Overflow as a great Ruby Q&A site. A single question can have multiple tags, so you don’t have to figure out which single category it fits in best. Like everything else, the tags can be edited by good-natured individuals to help keep things sorted out neatly. And you can have a little fun: stick a homework tag on those questions where someone seems to be asking how to delete an item from a linked list…
… What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
I’m extremely excited about Stack Overflow. It’s fast and clean. It costs us practically nothing to operate, so we won’t need to plaster it with punch-the-monkey ads; we plan to keep it free and open to the public forever. And it might make it a little bit easier to be a programmer.
Think you know how to update OS X?
You only think you know how.
I thought I knew too, but I've learned better. Not even Daring Fireball's update process mentions removing the network cable, but I now know that's essential:
Pull the ethernet cable, disable the wireless -- heck, pull your home net connection!
I'll keep updating my post on OS X upgrades as I learn and see more. I'm right to approach this process the way I'd approach a rabid wolf ...
I thought I knew too, but I've learned better. Not even Daring Fireball's update process mentions removing the network cable, but I now know that's essential:
Gordon's Tech: OS X major version updates - my approachAn old version of MobileMe, launched on startup, can destroy your cloud data. Not to mention Spanning Sync, Missing Sync, etc, etc.
.... Pull the network cable (see below). You can plug it in when you need to get software updates. Nowadays there are all sorts of things a partly updated machine can destroy if it can get a the net....
Pull the ethernet cable, disable the wireless -- heck, pull your home net connection!
I'll keep updating my post on OS X upgrades as I learn and see more. I'm right to approach this process the way I'd approach a rabid wolf ...
OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application
In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):
The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.
So her Missing Sync for Blackberry was running in my account -- at the same time as my instance of Spanning Sync was running (both products come from two unrelated and very good vendors).
Now I'm not a registered user of Missing Sync for Blackberry, so it shouldn't have run. But I am a registered user of a recently uninstalled verison of Missing Sync for Palm. Somehow remnants of both, whch both use the OS X sync services, interacted with an old Mark/Space data file that the Mark/Space uninstaller left in my library (I wish uninstallers were better at removing Library data folders, though this remnant might have been living in a Sync Services folder.)
This all caused a sync storm, with lots of reconciliation tasks. Unfortunately the current version of Spanning Sync doesn't give users much feedback about what it's doing, but that will change with version 2.0 (in beta).
I removed the errant login items and hunted down old Missing Sync data folders in my Library. The Sync Storm seems to be over, now I just have to clean up the wreckage.
Sync is hard. Bugs are bad. Sync bugs are the worst.
There's a broader lesson here, beyond my oft-expressed hope that Apple will concentrate on quality and bug fixes for 10.6.
Today's computers (I use XP at least as much as OS X, it's at least as bad) are absolutely not suited for non-geeks. I think my original DOS 2.1 computer was more non-geek friendly -- if only because it was so limited. The original Apple or Commodore GEOS systems were probably the best non-geek machines.
In some ways browser-based single vendor solutions are a move back to the limited power and relative simplicity of those days.
[1] Many of these bugs were fixed in 10.5.4 -- but as of a few months ago Apple still shipped 10.5.2 on their update/install DVD. So even those of us smart enough to avoid 10.5 until now are bit by these bugs. Bad choice Apple.
- LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
- Permissions - apps cannot be updated
- Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
- The unknown user and group bugs
The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.
So her Missing Sync for Blackberry was running in my account -- at the same time as my instance of Spanning Sync was running (both products come from two unrelated and very good vendors).
Now I'm not a registered user of Missing Sync for Blackberry, so it shouldn't have run. But I am a registered user of a recently uninstalled verison of Missing Sync for Palm. Somehow remnants of both, whch both use the OS X sync services, interacted with an old Mark/Space data file that the Mark/Space uninstaller left in my library (I wish uninstallers were better at removing Library data folders, though this remnant might have been living in a Sync Services folder.)
This all caused a sync storm, with lots of reconciliation tasks. Unfortunately the current version of Spanning Sync doesn't give users much feedback about what it's doing, but that will change with version 2.0 (in beta).
I removed the errant login items and hunted down old Missing Sync data folders in my Library. The Sync Storm seems to be over, now I just have to clean up the wreckage.
Sync is hard. Bugs are bad. Sync bugs are the worst.
There's a broader lesson here, beyond my oft-expressed hope that Apple will concentrate on quality and bug fixes for 10.6.
Today's computers (I use XP at least as much as OS X, it's at least as bad) are absolutely not suited for non-geeks. I think my original DOS 2.1 computer was more non-geek friendly -- if only because it was so limited. The original Apple or Commodore GEOS systems were probably the best non-geek machines.
In some ways browser-based single vendor solutions are a move back to the limited power and relative simplicity of those days.
[1] Many of these bugs were fixed in 10.5.4 -- but as of a few months ago Apple still shipped 10.5.2 on their update/install DVD. So even those of us smart enough to avoid 10.5 until now are bit by these bugs. Bad choice Apple.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Screen Sharing in Leopard is a toy feature
When Leopard came out, I was very excited about the screen sharing feature. I thought I'd buy the OS in Jan 2008 for that feature alone, but there were so many bugs I waited until Sept 2008 to update my main machine.
During that long wait there was great excitement about how useful Screen Sharing in Leopard 10.5 was.
Cough.
Actually, there was total silence. A very suspicious total silence.
Which made it easier for me to wait until 10.5 was halfway decent; I knew my original expectations wouldn't be met.
Today, with both the MacBook and iMac running 10.5, I launched my long delayed test. It took about five minutes to make the call.
I'll keep it short. Leopard's VNC-based screen sharing is a toy compared to Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop.
Yes, it's marginally better than the worthless VNC tools I've previously used on OS X, but only someone who'd never used Citrix or Remote Desktop could think this imagine this VNC based solution was in any way comparable.
It is suitable only for use with iChat to do remote debugging, or with 'back to your desktop' to retrieve little fragments of data.
Typing lag is intolerable. The "scaling" is bitmap, not vector. There's no automatic vector resolution matches to the current display (which Microsoft has done for about 10 years).
The remote window is hemmed by the usual OS X chrome, so the usable screen space is very small. Keystrokes are not adequately captured; for example, I can't run LaunchBar on the remote display as the the local app captures my keystrokes.
Apple once marketed screen sharing as the #4 feature in Leopard, a few steps behind Time Machine (which has so far been of no use to me). Clearly Leopard was not about providing new features to users -- it was really about moving the development platform along.
OS X 10.5 was originally supposed to have a scalable Quartz-based UI with (screen) resolution independence. I can imagine that there was a screen sharing solution that went with that scalable UI, and that it was a serious Citrix/RDP competitor. Apple pulled the scalable UI before 10.5 was released; given how troubled 10.5 was, we know they made the right decision. Maybe, after the scalable UI was lost, Apple jammed this VNC solution in to fill the hole.
I'm sure I'll find a few uses for it, but nothing like what I was hoping for.
Update 9/27/08: BTW, you can only connect to the current user session. If it were possible to connect to a background session I'd have given screen sharing some points. It's obvious by the lack of objection to Apple's marketing that this is one of those capabilities that the vast majority of users really don't need or want!
During that long wait there was great excitement about how useful Screen Sharing in Leopard 10.5 was.
Cough.
Actually, there was total silence. A very suspicious total silence.
Which made it easier for me to wait until 10.5 was halfway decent; I knew my original expectations wouldn't be met.
Today, with both the MacBook and iMac running 10.5, I launched my long delayed test. It took about five minutes to make the call.
I'll keep it short. Leopard's VNC-based screen sharing is a toy compared to Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop.
Yes, it's marginally better than the worthless VNC tools I've previously used on OS X, but only someone who'd never used Citrix or Remote Desktop could think this imagine this VNC based solution was in any way comparable.
It is suitable only for use with iChat to do remote debugging, or with 'back to your desktop' to retrieve little fragments of data.
Typing lag is intolerable. The "scaling" is bitmap, not vector. There's no automatic vector resolution matches to the current display (which Microsoft has done for about 10 years).
The remote window is hemmed by the usual OS X chrome, so the usable screen space is very small. Keystrokes are not adequately captured; for example, I can't run LaunchBar on the remote display as the the local app captures my keystrokes.
Apple once marketed screen sharing as the #4 feature in Leopard, a few steps behind Time Machine (which has so far been of no use to me). Clearly Leopard was not about providing new features to users -- it was really about moving the development platform along.
OS X 10.5 was originally supposed to have a scalable Quartz-based UI with (screen) resolution independence. I can imagine that there was a screen sharing solution that went with that scalable UI, and that it was a serious Citrix/RDP competitor. Apple pulled the scalable UI before 10.5 was released; given how troubled 10.5 was, we know they made the right decision. Maybe, after the scalable UI was lost, Apple jammed this VNC solution in to fill the hole.
I'm sure I'll find a few uses for it, but nothing like what I was hoping for.
Update 9/27/08: BTW, you can only connect to the current user session. If it were possible to connect to a background session I'd have given screen sharing some points. It's obvious by the lack of objection to Apple's marketing that this is one of those capabilities that the vast majority of users really don't need or want!
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