My G+ Profile - open to connect

My blogs are pseudonymous, but it's not hard to find my true name if you click around a bit. I just prefer that my corporate colleagues and customers don't suffer the full range of my opinions and speculations.

Which means, since G+ is open, I'm good with sharing and corresponding there. I typically share with my "extended circle" (circles and one removed) -- just a bit short of public. I use LinkedIn for purely corporate and teaching connections, Facebook is where I tell kid stories, so G+ is the intellectual slot. It's a good match to the blogs.

If you're interested, here's my profile [1] and my "John Gordon" circle.

[1] Note the URL has the number of this beast: 113810027503326386174. Just call me 113.

(cross posted to notes and tech.)

Google Reader may yet live: signs of buzz/G+ integration

Today Google added G+ search to their newly opened Google Plus services.

First thing I did was search on "Google Reader" for signs of life in one of my favorite Google products. I'd recently put it on my death list due to long dangling half-finished work that encrusts Reader.

I found several optimistic signs, including this post:  Tracy L. Crawford - Google+ - Google Reader Shares have a G+ link!.

In my case it's that the "options" drop down in posts shared by people I follow says "View this shared item in Google Buzz". If I try that it actually shows in G+.

Seems like some Buzz/Reader integration is underway. What you see may depend on whether you have Buzz enabled or not.

Keynote.app for OS X (iWork)

I've made a stepwise transition to Apple's iWork suite for OS X. Apple's App Store made it easy; module prices are low and I could evaluate each iWork app separately. The license allows me to install on any number of 10.6+ machines on my account. Keynote.app, for example, cost $6/machine.

I started with Numbers.app nine months ago. My needs are not great, but so far I've been pleased. Of all the apps it comes closes to its Office counterpart. Since Excel has always been Microsoft's great software achievement this is strong praise. The main competitor to Numbers.app, however, is not Microsoft. It's Google's Spreadsheet. With offline support for Google Spreadsheet Mac users have two good alternatives to Office. I'm not sure which I'll go with.

This week I switched from Nisus Writer Pro to Pages. That's a surprisingly big jump. I'd forgotten that Pages is more of an desktop publishing app than a word processor. I'm not sure how well it will work for the family. I'll post more on Pages over time.

This post though, is about Keynote.app. I'll update it in bullet form as I use it to present a lecture this week. Below are my initial impressions.

• There's a lot of UI continuity and functional continuity with PowerPoint. My initial impression is that the base functionality is a simplified subset of PowerPoint.
• On my machines performance is much better than Office 2008 PPT (the latter was unusable). I suspect PPT's code base is a mess on any platform.
• Importing a relatively simple PPT took a fair bit of cleanup. Slide component alignment varied. Diagram overlays scattered.
• Exporting to PPT worked much better than import (mercifully).
• Applying themes to single slides or presentations is much better than PPT (big plus).
• Bug: I was unable to italicize text on an imported PPT. Seems Keynote assigned the text an exotic font that lacked italics or bold. It's a bug because the UI implied I could italicize, there's no error when you try, and the substitution is odd. The fix was to 'View Masters', consolidate masters, and change the Master Slide font.
• Themes made a mess of an imported PPT. I'm disappointed in the Themes -- they're often tacky. Almost Microsoft tacky.
• Consolidating Master is well done. View Masters, if you delete one you're asked to choose another to apply. Really helped clean up an ugly PPT file.
• The default fonts in text boxes for my imported PPT had an odd font. I had to use the Format>Advanced>Define Text for All Masters to fix it.
• Bug: Unpredictably, when creating a new row, I get a very odd bullet point. It looks like a Satanic glyph.
• Bug: Keynote/Lion can run into issues with window positioning and external displays. There are also weird behaviors with save/versioning. These look like a mixture of Lion and Keynote bugs.
• The default font for presenter notes is ridiculously small. There's no UI way to change it but you can hack the theme. If you make the font large, however, you can't read it in the fixed and narrow speakers notes display -- and long notes are mess when printing handouts. I hope this is fixed in the next release; it needs real work.

Update 10/20: Exporting as PPT -> "An unknown error occurred". Right. Not the only keynote bug, but certainly a bad one. Apple doesn't do very many industrial quality apps, and this isn't one of them (yet).

Resolving ghost printers in Win7 - delete redundant print queue

My corporate Win 7.64 box had a printing problem. Everything looked fine, but jobs sent to some printers didn't appear.

I was also seeing "ghost" printers -- they displayed in Windows print dialogs, but they didn't show in Control Panel "Devices and Printers".

For example, from the print dialog I saw "biz-c1" and "biz-c1 (copy 1)", but from the control panel I saw only "biz-c1 (copy 1)".

I think this glitch came from running an XP or 32 bit Win 7 printer installer on a 64 bit machine.

The printers that had this problem had an extra context menu entry "delete print queue". After a I deleted the "older" (non-copy 1) queues this context menu item disappeared! (Google was no help, this was my closest hit.).

The transient "delete print queue" menu item worked to fix the print dialogs. They again show a single queue. Even better, my printing was restored.

I assume this is a bug in Windows 7 that Microsoft knows about. There has to be a reason that the "delete print queue" option appeared on printers that had a redundant print queue. It's odd that it's not better documented however.

Facebook Pages: Only Administrator status updates go to fans

There are many books and web pages that try to explain how Facebook works.

Alas, even the most topical material gets most things wrong -- confusing messages with stream updates for example. It doesn't help that the rules change constantly [2]. Even Facebooks own, very limited, documentation is often dated. For example ...

Facebook Pages: How to manage a Facebook Page - Facebook Help Center:

... Your Page [1] can now post status messages - short text-only messages like those found on user profiles. Soon, these statuses will appear in fans’ News Feeds...

I don't know when this was last revised, but Page updates have been appearing in my News Feeds for months.

Ultimately, the only documentation on Facebook is Facebook. It's mind-boggling that this works for them. Suggests most of humanity has given up on understanding how the modern world works; which means that modern services need not be understandable.

If you want to know how something works, you have to experiment.

So I did this experiment on one of the Pages I administer. These Pages are "Liked" in my Profile.

I posted from two non-admin accounts (Emily and mine) and 1 admin account. I found.

1. When a Person posts an update on a publicly accessible Page it is public and viewable to anyone on the net, regardless of one's FB privacy settings. This is obvious in retrospect, but I suspect most people don't know this.
2. When a Page posts an update it goes to all subscribers.
3. When someone you "Friend" posts an update on a Page you subscribe to you will receive a Wall (stream) update notice.

What I couldn't test is what happens when someone who is not a "Friend" of mine posts an update to Page I "Like". I suspect, in this case, I will not receive any Wall update.

So for the Pages I administer, if I want a status update to be received by all "Fans", I need to post it "as the Page" rather than using my personal account.

john

[1] In Facebook lingo a "Page" is something belong to an organization or celebrity or business. Individuals have "Walls". "Pages" have "Fans", regular people have "Friends".
[2] For example -- until today Facebook sharing has been symmetrical. If I "Like" someone they are notified of my shares and I'm notified of their shares. We have mutual access. Ok, I'm simplifying, the notification rules are constantly changing.

Nisus Writer Pro, OpenOffice and Rosetta - why I bought Pages.app

I've been a longtime user of Nisus Writer Pro. There's a lot of good things about it, but what I most like is the native file format. NWP uses RTF, the closest thing we have to a standard document format.

What liked least, though, is NWP's .doc import. It's slow and troubled.

Today I discovered something I liked even less. Our MacBook fan was running full tilt, but I couldn't see any explanation. Process Explorer didn't show anything grabbing CPU -- at least nothing I could recognize.

Then I sorted by memory allocation -- and I found OpenOffice.org taking up a very large amount of memory. Process Explorer told me it was running in Rosetta as PPC code.

That made no sense. OO wasn't running; it's not even installed on that machine Mail.app, Safari and Nisus Writer Pro were the only apps running. So I quit them one at a time. When I finally quit NWP the OpenOffice process died.

A few moments later the now Rosetta free 10.6 machine cooled down. The fan went silent.

There's not much on this around the web. Google found only the one post ...

Modified OpenOffice source code
Nisus Writer Pro (versions 1.2 to 2.0 inclusive) use modified OpenOffice code to help with the import/export of certain file formats. Under the OpenOffice license any modified copies of the source code must be published and made available. The source code used by Nisus Writer Pro can be downloaded below.

I'm on 1.4.2.

I think that explains why their .doc import was so slow and problematic. NWP was spinning up Rosetta code. It also explains months of mysterious battery killing machine baking problems.

NWP has now switched to LibreOffice (2.0.1)
Changed: import: switched DOCX/.doc file importers from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. This fixes a variety of problems, including cases of garbled text, formatting bleed, etc. Also made some other fixes to import process.

I suspect they had to do this to run on 10.7.

I could pay the money to go from 1.4.2 to 2.0.1 -- but I feel like a chump.

I'm buying Pages for $20, or about $6/machine.


Related

• Word processing on OS X: my personal choices (11/07)
• Nisus Writer Professional: the undocumented but critical improvement (4/09)
• Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love (6/08)

Update 5/29/2012: I don't think I ever did a formal review of Pages. Here are some quick impressions after use with one longish project.

• Pages is 90% of the way to being a robust and full featured project. Unfortunately there's no sign that Apple intends to finish it; if anything their current directions are away from traditional applications like Pages.app and Numbers.app. 
• Pages doesn't need a major rewrite or redo. It needs the 10% gap filled.
• Pages is somewhat buggy, but less buggy than any version of Word I've used. So it's bugs are acceptable. I've learned to work around them.
• Pages has a workable implementation of Style Sheets. That's better than 17 years of Microsoft Word (to be fair Word had great Style Sheets prior to 1995 or so).
• It's annoying that Tables cannot contain Tables.
• Pages limited import capability, particularly for Apple/Claris wordprocessors of old, is very annoying. (I wonder if Apple/Claris no longer has access to the code for those old file formats.)

Gmail and iOS: When I say DELETE I mean DELETE

I thought I had this figured out long ago. When I deleted an email from my iPhone, it would be deleted from my "Exchange" (ActiveSync) GMail account.

I was wrong. It works that way for my corporate ActiveSync account but not for Gmail. The iPhone button said "DELETE" but the messages were being sent to "All Mail". My "All Mail" archive was infested with spam.

I thought this was a matter of some fiddling with Gmail or iOS Settings. That's wrong too. At this time if you use ActiveSync (Exchange Server) to sync Gmail with your iOS Mail.app delete on the iPhone will always Archive in Gmail - regardless of what the Mail.app UI indicates.

This doesn't seem to be documented. There's (misleading and confusing) documentation on iOS IMAP behavior, but I couldn't find anything official. There is, however, a long old thread in Google's forums about this, degenerating at times as to whether this is a bug and, if so, whose bug it is. (IMHO - Google's bug.)

The only fix is to stop using ActiveSync for email and return to Apple's default IMAP based Gmail account setup. In that mode there's an iOS settings control to change Gmail Archive behavior. That works.

I suspect I solved this back when I used Apple's preferred iOS Gmail/IMAP setup, and didn't catch the recurrence when I switched to using Google's preferred Gmail/ActiveSync setup.