The Dark Balloon

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The mouse beneath the wooden floor.

The man passed through the gates of Heaven and into the computer lab. iMacs surrounded him. He sat down at a terminal and opened up Safari. He tried to scroll with the Mighty Mouse. The wheel only scrolled up. It could not scroll down. Frustrated, the man tried another terminal. Again, one-way scrolling. That’s when he realized he was not in Heaven. He was in Hell.

Tiny nits for 10.4 found from somebody who’s now using both Windows and OS X on a daily basis. (By the way, Cocoa-wide Emacs keybindings is a stroke of genius.)

• Applications all use the same menubar interface, but the default key to start navigating it is Ctrl-F2. Worse however is that OS X lacks the one-key shortcuts that Windows applications have. (For example, Alt-F, X for File → Exit.)
• Tab should do more than go to text input boxes by default. That option just seems braindead: When in a form have you ever thought to yourself, “I want to work on the keyboard for all the input fields and then go back and use the mouse to click dropdown boxes and radio buttons and the submit gizmo.”
• To Mac OS X application developers: This is not Windows. I should be able to install your application locally and without root access. People with disk images are fine. People with root-only installers get a big smack on the head.
• The font chooser dialog is way too complex and cannot be closed by Cmd-W or Esc. There’s also no way to focus the search box via keyboard.
• Should all search boxes have a keyboard shortcut? I say yes. Finder says yes (Cmd-F). Safari (for the box that searches Google) and iTunes say no. That sucks.
• Preview is great for PDFs, but it could do better in allowing users to zoom. There’s not even a only the suboptimal Cmd-+ keyboard shortcut for it, and it’s one of my most used functions in a PDF reader.

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The definitive list of what will happen in 2008

dfdb is proud to expand to politics and music and culture and current events this year.

• Despite the best efforts of America’s women, Obama will become president of the United States and, by proxy, the world. His vice president? Some white person nobody cares about.
• The Funnelwhich will get a quantity of updates that is a multiple of three. Maybe.
• New Amsterdam will get canceled even though it’s a damn good show.
• Google’s suite of office software will continue to suck. TRUE
• Apple will learn how to make iPod nanos not look like the fat chick nobody likes. Also, gray? Seriously? Gray’s going away.
• People will continue to enjoy pornography in novel and exciting new ways despite the best efforts a new production company, n-girls + n-1 cups.
• foobar 0.9.5.2 will be released to much “fanfare.”
• Franz Ferdinand and The Fratellis will release their new albums. Somebody will make yet another postmortem album for Elliot Smith.
• There will be no new Windows OS release because most scientists agree such an event would cause a permanent rip in the very fabric of Bill Gates’ pants. And nobody wants to see his butt.
• That’s right, I’m making this public: Bill Gates goes commando on a daily basis. ♫ Thonnnng. ♫
• House will get renewed despite crappier writing and even crappier medicine.
• The next version of Mac OS X will contain, let’s say, Firewire support. And better icons than those in Leopard. And a TCP/IP Stack®.
• People will continue to not care about any of the Linux operating systems.

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2007 predictions, final updates

Let’s wrap up the 2007 predictions with as little crying as possible, OK?

[Mac OS X failing], with Vista, will leave a power vacuum in the OS market, one that is not filled by Linux, which will lack an OS to copy from which to copy any more features.

TRUE. 2007 was not a good year for operating systems. Unless, of course, you count the release of Emacs 22.1. What happened to version 22, you ask? It’s currently lost in the beard of Richard Stallman, and no amount of open source communism is enough to entice anybody to go and retrieve it.

Web 2.0 will stagnate.

TRUE. Web 2.0 is no longer cool. Lame Internet fads are cool again.

Language interpreters will become a bottleneck.

TRUE. Python is cool now. We all know Python is not interpreted; it’s, in fact fed through van Rossum’s head before he manually flips the diodes in your monitor. That’s right, I’m making this public: Python only runs on LCDs. Deal with it, bitches.

Perl 6.0 will not be released. Python 3000 will not be released.

DOUBLE TRUE. Perl now has Rakudo, Pugs, and about twenty other mini-languages. Apparently, “focus” in the Perl community is a weird way of spelling “vapor.” As in vaporware. MORPHEME BURN. Sizzle sizzle, bitches. (Seriously, when C++0x adds a whole bunch of unnecessary features, it’s lame. But when Perl 6 does it, it’s “Come on, we have nightly builds?”)

dotfloofy dotblog will reach its fourth anniversary.

FALSE. We had a continuity jump and we are, indeed, in our sixth anniversary by now. Scientists, with their sciencing, widely believe this is due to anomalies caused by the pesto sauce I spilled back around June of 2007.