Beer with subtitles

Wow. What happened? It’s slow, it’s ugly, it’s unstable. I realise it’s not exactly a state of the art machine I’m using but, nevertheless, my true and trusty T41 has run everything else I’ve ever thrown at it: Windows XP, Gnome under Ubuntu with its “enable desktop effects” wobbly windows and all. With 2GB of RAM it’s still a serious machine after 6 years on the go…until it met KDE 4, that is.

Why am I using KDE at all? I make a point of not doing so usually, aside from one indispensable application: Amarok. I use Amarok for one very important purpose: organising my music collection. With its support for visualising your tags in all possible dimensions, automatic cover art fetching and its killer “organise files” feature it is pretty much the ultimate MP3 collection organising utility. Apparently, it also plays music. That it was the one odd-ball KDE application remaining on my desktop was a perfectly acceptable compromise, given the advantages.

Last weekend’s upgrade to Ubuntu Jaunty, however, had the unfortunate side-effect of dragging in KDE 4. Suddenly Amarok (Amarok 2, now) had a totally alien UI with car-aaazy decorations looking like something out of CDE in 1995 and a truly horrible (and un-hideable) plug-in system in the middle third of the screen, used for no less than 4 separate high-tech purposes such as “disconnect media device”. That it now crashes regularly and is slower than before is simply icing on the cake.

The KDE Years

It’s very sad and it certainly wasn’t always like this. After years of neglecting the grand “desktop environments” of KDE and Gnome in favour of Afterstep, I was won over in 2000 by KDE 2. It looked good, was easy to configure and – most of all – had the then amazing Konqueror filemanager and browser. In a world before Firefox, what Konqueror had achieved was simply stunning: it rendered pages better than Netscape, was nicer to use and, though it had seemingly come out of nowhere,  nobody was surprised to find Apple using its rendering engine  as the basis for OS X’s Safari.

It was so obviously, clearly good that I didn’t look back for several years and in fact went on to install KDE in the course of several contracting jobs, including one just after that fateful initial discovery in which a fleet of thin client workstations served a KDE 2 desktop to a school interested in exploring alternatives to Microsoft software.

The Gnome Years

Years later, a similar instant switch occurred when I tried Ubuntu and its default window environment, Gnome. Having disregarded Gnome for years, here, for the first time on a Linux desktop, was a nice default look and feel. Nicer and more polished than Windows which – though I hated using it for any length of time – had undoubtedly always looked and felt better right out of the box. The file manager was good: nice thumbnails and you could burn CDs by selecting a bunch of files and right-clicking “burn to CD”. GIMP looked and worked well – helped, obviously, by being the original GTK application but nevertheless fitting in perfectly. Firefox had come of age, too, of course, long ago replacing Konqueror. By now, of course, all our work was done in the browser anyway and that holy trinity of file manager, web browser and photo software was all I really needed or wanted to work right…except for Amarok, of course.

In contrast with KDE’s continuing “how many pixels between a window’s outer-frame and its inner widget bounding box” approach, Gnome had spent time studying what users actually wanted to configure and stripped away all the trimmings. There really was nothing offensive to reconfigure, beyond perhaps a desktop background. In doing so, they had foreshadowed Apple’s rise which was built on providing good looking hardware and software that just worked and that ordinary people could use.

That geeks have since flocked to OS X might indicate that it’s not just ordinary people who want their computers to, like, work. I suspect those who prefer to run free software or are overly attached to their IBM hardware (or both) have probably switched by now to Gnome for this very reason; perhaps this migration of talented hackers itself fatally dented KDE’s chance of ever mounting a resurgence. For me, it seems that, after the initial quantum leap of version 2, KDE remains stuck in a time warp in the year 2001. Suggestions for a new MP3 collection software are very welcome!

1. Connect iPod to MacBook. iTunes has compatibility with such devices, to a point.
2. iTunes recognises iPod.
3. iPod library appears in iTunes.
4. I play a track.
5. Track plays. I’m happy, however fleetingly.
6. Error message appears saying something like “iPod cannot be synced as the file is locked.” I am puzzled and concerned since I ticked the box “do not even attempt to sync my library with my iPod, ever” because I have an advanced piece of software over here which handles multi-directional transfer of music between computers and portable music players and doesn’t require credit card details in order to download album artwork.
7. I continue but this message keeps appearing. Over in the iTunes browser, weird things are happening.
8. Ignore all training by suddenly ripping iPod cable from iPod. Scare co-workers by swearing loudly in the office.
9. The genre of each track I’ve played through iTunes has inexplicably changed from “Electronic” to “5″.Vow never to try anything involving iTunes ever again…especially playing music.

It’s true that you don’t miss things until they’re gone. Take alt-tab, the standard window switching mechanism, for example.

Apple-tab is the OS X equivalent. This is fair enough since the apple key is in the same position as ctrl is on non-Mac keyboards. It’s the same idea – and, in fact, placement – as the old Amiga key. On a side note, perhaps in future we could all adopt an “OS key” for operating system-specific operations.

Anyway, apple-tab is no alt-tab. It switches between a seemingly random mix of open, closed and what-I-thought-I-closed-two-days-ago applications. Right now, for instance, apple-tab lets me switch between Quicktime, Finder, Preview and iTerm. Except that, when I select any of the first three, no window actually appears. Only iTerm jumps to the front. The others’ menu is activated but no other visible sign.

Is it because I’m using Virtual Desktops? Are the other applications “hidden”? I’ve no idea. OS X has no concept of virtual desktops so it’s a reasonable theory. If so, it’s still pretty unforgiveable to lack virtual desktops.

Also, note that apple-tab is an application switcher. If you spend your day in web applications (i.e. 50 Firefox windows) then you’re going to need to practise your mouse skills to switch windows.

The taskbar thing at the bottom of the desktop is no help, either – a big long list of applications with a little overlaid arrow signifying that the application is currently running. Same story when I click on the icon, however.

(I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who’s been using OS X for about a month and hasn’t read any documentation on OS X and, to be perfectly honest, isn’t planning to and honestly thinks that needing a manual for something as basic as window-switching is a bad sign.)

I missed the xscreensaver screensavers so ubiquitous on Linux; it isn’t too hard to find them all compiled for the Mac.

• The “traditional” screensavers are pre-compiled here.
• Most of the extra-funky “Really Slick” savers are available. There seems to be at least a couple of different sources for these but I used the ones from the Really Slick download page.

Once downloaded, simply copy and paste the *.saver files into the Library/Screen Savers folder in your home directory.

That’s a pretty nice way to install things, by the way…especially after last night’s rant.

New job, new setup.

Google provides the option of either a Mac or Thinkpad laptop for all its engineers. Well, although I adore the T41, I wasn’t so enamoured with the T60. Anecdotal reports of weird hardware problems tallied with my own experiences – in short, they just don’t make Thinkpads like they used to. Having heard so many wonderful things about OS X, I reasoned it was time to try something new.

The MacBook Pro is a wonderful thing to behold. Silver and thin, it sports a widescreen display and boots in seconds. The trip-proof magnetic power connector is genius. First impressions are second to none.

However, the problems quickly became apparent:

• The touchpad is the worst I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure out how to adjust the acceleration and so small movements go unregistered while larger movements fly off into the great beyond. It’s not a case of getting used to touchpads…I’ve been using these things for years and this is the first one that grates.
• There is no right mouse button.
• Crucially for me, there is no trackpoint. The trackpoint is absolutely impenetrable for several months, even years. Eventually, however, you subconsciously discard the trackpad and rely on the trackpoint. It’s ergonimically better and far more efficient. You simply cannot go back to RSI-inducing touchpads.
• Everybody and their dog seems to adore two-finger scrolling but I can’t warm to it all, probably because of the aforementioned fundamental response issue. I miss the “hot zone”-style scrolling of Windows and Linux.
• Battery life is nothing special, seemingly averaging about 3 and a half hours.
• Cursor keys are just plain weird. They’re microscopically thin and first experiences with vim and console-based newsreaders are bad: you need alt to make them behave as cursor keys.
• Ditto for the escape keys, function keys and, crucially, enter key.
• Caps lock is inexplicably huge.
• The feel of the keyboard is…average (to say the least).
• There’s only two USB ports and the right hand-side port is right where you would put your (essential, unfortunately) external mouse.
• Alt-tab is broken: it switches between applications, not windows. In this age where many of us live in Firefox, this is unacceptable.
• There is no virtual desktop support built-in. The user interface has all these wonderful 3D concepts built in but makes almost no use of it, as far as I can see.

Well, because of the first three points I have to use an external mouse. In that case, what’s the point of having a laptop? The keyboard problems effectively rule out doing any development on this machine (or remotely, via this machine, i.e. from home). All the other points just make the whole Mac experience a bit of a chore. I love the wireless network support and magic power connector but otherwise I’m extremely underwhelmed. I’d just like to do some work now.

All is forgiven, Thinkpad – if it had the build quality of the T4x series then the T60 would be perfect. As it is, it remains the laptop for me.