A long, long time ago, I made a list of what my web browser (Camino at the time, now pretty evenly split between Firefox, Chromium and Safari) would suggest when I type just a single letter. Here is what Alfred serves up today:

• Audacity
• VirtualBox
• Calculator
• Dropbox
• Eclipse
• YoruFukurou
• GitX
• HDRtist
• iPhoto
• Java_ME_SDK_3_0
• Kindle
• MarkdownLive
• MarkdownLive
• MP Navigator EX 2.0
• LibreOffice
• System Preferences
• QuickTime Player
• BIT.TRIP.RUNNER
• Safari
• Tunnelblick
• WhichWayIsUp
• VirtualBox
• TextWrangler
• Xcode
• YoruFukurou
• Affe..Zebra

Just yesterday, I wrote about how Chinese users might benefit from a special version of iOS, and now today's announcement of Mountain Lion has this passage:

It’s a new Mac experience in China. OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate.

Apple have just announced (in a rather unusual fashion) that they plan to speed up the release cycle of OS X, aiming for a major update every year, starting with Mountain Lion, scheduled for summer. The main focus for them is to align OS X with iOS, in terms of user experience, but also in the amount of control they assert over the platform.

The biggest difference between traditional computers and post-PC devices is how you install applications, respectively from files you could have gotten anywhere versus an official (and tightly controlled) market place. When the Mac App Store launched, it was obvious that this would be the model Apple prefers, but that they would be using carrots and sticks to make everyone accept that. It already carried a couple of carrots: For consumers, it is easy to find and install apps, it takes care of updates and installing it on all you computers, you do not have to be afraid of malware, and payments are done with your existing Apple ID. For smaller developers it provides exposure to a much bigger audience, and takes care of the hassle of having to handle payment processing (on the other hand, bigger developers probably don't need that and would rather not pay the 30% cut, you do not get to build your own customer database anymore, and there is no mechanism for paid updates or free demos).

Mountain Lion now introduces a small stick and another set of carrots. In the carrot department, there are some additional features that are only available to App Store apps, most notably iCloud storage integration. The "Open File" dialog in Mountain Lion now has two modes, opening local files and opening cloud files. The latter is reserved for properly sandboxed and approved third-party software only.

As for sticks there is Gatekeeper, which is a setting that prevents installation of non-App-Store apps. That is not (yet?) the default, but the setting is available now. The current behaviour (of allowing everything) is not the default either, though. The new default is to only allow installs from "identified developers", which means either from the App Store or from cryptographically signed packages. An "identified developer" is anyone with an Apple developer account, and he can self-sign his software. There is no approval process, but in case malware is found, Apple will blacklist the developer account, and Macs will refuse to install his software. This mechanism is built on top of the existing facility that prompts for confirmation to run a downloaded program for the first time, there are several ways it can be circumvented, it does not disable software already installed, and developer accounts are probably very easy to get anyway, so this is not a fool-proof security measure, but still a nice idea.

I was quite surprised to find the new iTunes Match icon which must have appeared sometimes last week. Given the fight that the various groups representing rightsholders in Germany continue to put up against all kinds of Internet content services, I had not expected that to materialise for a long while (if ever). But it seems that for 25 Euro per year you can now officially put your library of non-iTunes-purchased music into Apple's digital locker, allowing you to stream it to all your fruity devices or just upconvert low-quality CD rips to 256kb DRM-free tracks.

Being not much of a music listener, iTunes Match itself is not a service I am interested in, but along with it comes iTunes in the Cloud, the ability to re-download songs previously purchased from Apple. Remember the broken track I got in October? Probably not, but I do. I was now able to click on a nice little cloud symbol and that got me a new version of the file, and this time it was complete. Happy. Plus I still have the voucher for another free song that I got from customer support. Double happiness.

I brought back my third Mac mini from our recent trip to Japan (it is cheaper there than here in Shanghai). Unlike its predecessors, it is not going to be a replacement machine, but an addition: I am going to continue using my MacBook Pro as my main computer (especially for work) for the foreseeable future, but its hard disk has been filling up, and the new mini's first main purpose is to offload our media libraries.

Hardware

Nice things come in small packages. The mini was quite compact to begin with, so that the new one is only half the size of the other two is not a big deal for me, but I do appreciate that they have done away with the external power adapter, which used to be almost the same size as the computer itself, and thus rather inconvenient. Probably as part of the shrinking process, but maybe just because Apple just wanted to kill it, there is no optical drive anymore. I cannot remember when I have last used the drive on my MacBook Pro, so that is probably not a problem. The three use-cases that come to mind are installing the operating system, watching DVDs and ripping audio CDs. The first does not apply anymore, since Apple no longer ships disks and has replaced the process with a combination of recovery partitions, memory sticks, Time Machine backups and downloads. For everything else, one should be fine as long as there is at least one other computer with a drive in the household. A welcome addition is the SD card slot on the back.

Magic Trackpad

The first thing I noticed after turning on the machine was that it did not detect my USB mouse. That is a pretty bad situation, because you cannot do anything with a Mac without being able to move the pointer. It is also a complete mystery to me, since at least the basic functionality of USB mice is very standardized, and the same mouse works just fine on the MacBook Pro. Fortunately, I also bought a Magic Trackpad, which seems to be getting a prerequisite with the ongoing move towards gestures. There was another unexpected hurdle connecting it, though, as I was prompted for a Bluetooth peering code. A Google search (which I would not have been able to do without another computer at hand) had the solution (just type 0000), but why this dialogue is necessary is unclear to me. It must have been a bug, because it is not mentioned at all in the Trackpad's manual. Not quite the unboxing experience you want from Apple products.

Time Machine migration

There is a Migration Assistant that you can use to get your data from your old Mac to your new one. It has a number of options, including restoring everything or individual users' data from a Time Machine backup. I used this to migrate Cissy's user account and it worked like a charm: The new user account was created, all data was copied and everything looked just like on the old machine, from account icon to desktop background to open tabs in Firefox. From my own account I manually copied just the iTunes library off the backup disk. That also worked without problems. I want to do the same thing with the iPhoto library (another seventy gigs that the MacBook Pro could do without), but before that I will have to set up Time Machine backups on the new mini. I cannot quite decide if I want to enable backup encryption. While that is of course something that I have been wanting for a long time, the feature is new in Lion, and I would not be able to share the encrypted disk with Snow Leopard.

Lion

I cannot say much about the new operating system version yet, because my main Mac is still on Snow Leopard (and will probably stay that way), and I have only really used the new computer while I was setting it up (my day-to-day interaction with it at the moment is limited to updating my iPod every morning). Cissy does use the computer a lot, and has offered no complaints, but she practically lives in Firefox and hardly sees the OS at all. From what I have seen so far I like the new approach of showing applications full screen and using a three finger swipe to switch between them. Of course, this will probably not work for all kinds of applications, and there is currently no good way to integrate this in a multi-monitor setup. As for "natural scrolling", the reversed scroll direction is less confusing than I feared. If you are switching to Lion exclusively, this should not be a problem at all. Even if you are using going back and forth between Lion and older Macs or non-Macs, you'll pretty soon figure things out. It definitely helps to use a trackpad only on Lion, and a scroll-wheel mouse otherwise.

Standing desk

Our standing desk construction unfortunately does not accomodate a monitor, so we had to revert back to a more traditional arrangement for now. We replaced the chair with a yoga ball to make amends.

I have been shunning the Mac App Store so far. When it was new, I launched it once and then immediately removed it from my Dock. I did not like that Apple and their 30% cut gets between me and the developer, that there are no free trials, that you need both an iTunes account (even though the application may be free) to download applications and a local System Administrator account to install them (even though they could be installed into your home directory rather than system-wide, which is the way I prefer to install things), and that a single company gets to keep track of all my applications (that part is even more disturbing with the Kindle store, by the way, because they can track what I read, and judging from the recommendation mails Amazon sends out they are making good use of that information).

But of course, this system is gaining popularity rapidly, and it has a lot of advantages, too. Installing applications from the App Store is much safer than a random download from the Internet, both because Apple vets the applications, and because they (will very soon) enforce sandboxing, which prevents applications from doing bad things. You do not need to care about making backups of the install media or keeping track of license keys: Everything is tied to your iTunes account and can be re-downloaded at any time. Prices have come down a lot (probably mostly because of increased sales volume, maybe also because of increased competitive pressure), both for the applications per se, but also if you have multiple computers, because per-seat licensing is gone: you can install the applications on as many computers you want (with some exceptions in the Pro area).

And of course, there is no real alternative anymore when it comes to Apple's own software.

I just bought Keynote, Apple's answer to Powerpoint, because I need to prepare a presentation for next week. I have been doing these things with OpenOffice so far, but was getting increasingly annoyed by that program's sluggishness and ugliness. I had not bought any office productivity software since Claris Works back in the day, iWork (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) seemed a bit pricey at $79 considering how rarely I really need it, not to mention Microsoft Office. Keynote goes for a reasonable 16 Euro in the App Store, and I happen to have enough in iTunes credit that I cannot spend on iOS apps anyway until I replace my lost iPod, or apparently on music.

I trashed my old iBook G3 today. Of all the computers I have owned this was my favourite. I bought it when I started working in Tokyo in 2002, and it was my primary machine both privately and at work for about three years, after which I switched to a procession of Mac minis at home (and a procession of Dells at work). I would have loved to use it longer, but it was unfortunately not a very healthy little computer. I had already replaced a faulty logic board, a crashed hard-disk, and a cracked keyboard, when it was acting up again, in the end refusing to boot.

Apple had just announced their switch to Intel, and I wanted to wait for an Intel iBook, so I got a G4 mini as temporary fix. But in the end it took another four years for me to finally get a portable again. My old iBook was so perfect (except for the unreliable hardware) that I feared a new one would not hold up to it. Sure, the specs of a newer computer are always much better, but I did not like the small changes made to the later revisions. Why did they have to get rid of the cool transparent polycarbonate casing? Will not some scratched DVD or oddly-shaped CD-ROM get stuck in the slot-loading drive? Who came up with that terrible name MacBook? Is not 13.3 inch too big? Can I really do without Firewire? No removable battery ?

Before handing it over to the Apple shop (which hopefully takes care of recycling and proper disposal), I wanted to erase the hard disk. That was not an option, though, because the iBook refuses to boot. And so we spent the morning together in a final session, me taking the case apart to remove the drive (and the RAM while I was at it), which with this particular model is quite an undertaking.

If you want to make fun of MS Windows stability issues, you bring up the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD, although, to be honest, you hardly see them these days). When the Windows folks want to fire back, they point at the spinning beach ball that indicates an unresponsive Mac application. So these two design elements have negative connotations prominent enough that other system vendors should not want to copy them.

Today on the train the person next to me was using a Samsung Windows Mobile phone which displayed a spinning beach ball. In the four Windows logo colours. Weird.

PS: I also saw a guy with an iPhone and an iPod touch.

Another little feature request (along the lines of cleverer clippings) that for some reason is missing from OS X, even though it seems both obvious and trivial to implement:

Quick Look for plain text files.

Now, Apple claims that Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files , and it does work for some files (maybe those that end in .txt, although that would be very un-Mac-like), but most of the time I just get this:

To continue using Google Earth, you must accept the new Google privacy policies and allow Google Software Update to run in the background on your computer.

This software will update any Google software on your computer when new versions become available.

I don't think so.

Quick software tip: MPEG Streamclip.

Every picture viewer these days can also rotate the image by 90 degrees, but the same feature is much less available for video, so that I had to do quite a Google dance to find a way to fix a clip I shot with my mobile phone turned sideways. iPhoto cannot do it, Preview (which is surprisingly competent for photo editing ) does not do video, VLC does not do it, and I do not know how to do anything in iMovie. Quicktime Pro can do it, but that is not free. MPEG Streamclip is free, runs on Macs and Windows, and has a great number of features to cut and convert videos (if you know where to find them in the rather clunky UI).

For the last few months, I have been using Mozilla Prism to read my (Google) mail. Prism turns web pages into standalone applications so that I do not have to log in to my Google account with my main web browser.

Today I switched to Fluid, which is a Mac-only (Leopard-only, in fact) application that does the same thing, but is more polished than Prism. For one thing, it is more tightly integrated with the Mac: The GMail application it creates is a real standalone native application (works better in the Dock than GMail Prism, which was only a document), it uses Growl notifications and software auto-update, there is a full screen mode, and it can also create MenuExtras (so that you could get the latest slashdot articles in a pulldown next to the battery life indicator). It is based on WebKit rather than Gecko, has a lot of preference panels, and you can write extensions using Greasemonkey-compatible JavaScript or Objective-C. I also had a weird performance issue with GTalk in GMail in Prism (typing into the chat window was painfully slow), that I expect to be gone now.

Update: One problem with using Fluid is that apparently all WebKit applications share the same browser cookie storage (and there seems to be no way to turn that off). This makes it currently impossible to keep login information separate from Safari, and between Fluid applications. Fortunately, I do not use Safari, and Camino and Firefox of course have their own cookie jars. On the other hand, a lot of applications embed WebKit these days, and I am not at all comfortable with the notion that they all potentially leak state and clobber themselves.

After a week of usage, Leopard is starting to break down.

• After waking up from sleep mode, the connection to my Yamaha USB speakers is lost. Have to manually unplug and re-plug the cable, and then open the Audio preference panel to activate it again.
• Parts of the keyboard do not work in Eclipse anymore sometimes. Such as Undo (Cmd-Z). Still works from the menu, and after having used to menu, the keyboard shortcut also works again for some time.
• Most annoyingly, window switching stopped working with Spaces at some point (it worked in the beginning, and I am confident that a restart will fix it): I can click on the application icon all I want, or use Cmd-Tab, and this will switch to the application as it should, but only as far as the menu bar is concerned. It does not take me to the Space where the application lives, so that there is no window. The only way to get to the app is through the Spaces dashboard.
• CamelBones, and by extension PerlPad, are broken again, of course, but that was to be expected.

One of the oldest (and potentially most useful) Mac features are text clippings (probably works with other types of content as well). Selecting some text in any application and dragging it to the desktop creates a text clip file there. You can then later drag this clip back into other applications, which will paste the text there. Double-clicking on the text clip will open it in the Finder, so that you can see the contents of the clip. Unfortunately, that is all you can do with it. It would be trivial to allow editing the contents of the clip, but you cannot. It would be even more trivial to allow selecting parts of the clip so that you can do selective pastes. I run into this problem every time I want to paste my postal code, or some password into a web form. Since I cannot directly paste only the postal code part of my address clipping, I have to either retype it (here it would be nice if the clipping window floated on top of everything else) or paste it into in intermediate text area and copy/paste from there again. Lame. And so easy to be fixed.

So my wish for the next OS upgrade would be this tiny improvement. But since it has not happened in the last ten years, and everyone will be working on Time Machine, or Expose, or iPhone integration, I do not have high hopes here. I'll probably install some freeware tool to help me out here.

Update: Oh my god, this is retarded. Apparently, from 10.3, you can select parts of the text clipping and Command-C them, but the text will never actually highlight. I am assuming that being able to covertly select from text areas that are declared noSelection is a bug, but I hope they do not fix this before they fix Text Clippings. You can also hack a Finder resource file to remove the noSelection property (which fixes the highlighting issue), and even remove the readOnly property to be able to edit the clipping (although the changes will not be saved).