For the first time in a long time, I'm actually reading a book. It's not that I watch too much television instead, but I usually have a hard enough time keeping up with The New Yorker and Harper's. I'm not sure now if I'll even keep my subscription to The New Yorker, but maybe I'll augment Harper's with another monthly and try to get back to books. There are many on my list to read. Right now, it's "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Jim Carlton that's sitting next to me, waiting for me to put down the iBook (funnily enough) and get back into it. The writing is very jumpy, but maybe I've just gotten too used to magazine articles and essays. The story, however, is a great one. I hadn't realized how strong (and strange) of a figure Gasseé was in his own right. I'm hurrying to get through this one so I can get on to Amelio's book, "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple". I remember reading an interview with Amelio a few years ago, after he was ousted, in which he described Apple as being like a high school or college. He said that there was no real respect for authority among the engineers - they all had their cool projects and would basically do what they wanted. Carlton's book, at the point I'm at now, seems to be stating the same thing. What's interesting is how they were able to get away with it for so long because of, well, the Apple mentality that was often taken by the upper executives. It's like their line was "We'll cleverly invent our way through this!", hoping that the extravagent R and D budgets would yield the next big breakthrough like the original Mac OS. A lot of cool things came out of Apple Research Labs, such as Squeak, Dylan, and MCF (which would eventually become RDF). Contrast these projects though with Jobs' line "We'll innovate our way through this", and the Apple of today which tries to keep on tight deadlines (they don't always stick, and Mac OS X took a long time to get here, but by showing up it beats out all previous Apple attempts) and release software and hardware that actually does things for people. The old feeling of academia is gone. The new Apple doesn't always deliver greatness, but they do deliver. And they have given us a great platform to build and work on (finally). Going back to Classic on the rare occasions that I do makes me wonder if I'd still be putting up with all of its issues today. In any case, Apple's history is a fun read. And I'm now going to get back to it.
I had completely forgotten about its existence, but Apple's developer site still has back issues of Develop, Apple's technical/developer journal. There are lots of cool articles about OpenDoc and other things. Hmmm. I wonder if there's anything about Pink?
My experience with the Roundup issue tracker continues to be largely positive. With a total of two primary users, and one ancillary user, we're up to 63 issues and 193 messages running on the very basic DBM back end, after three weeks of usage. Those numbers are high considering (again) the two primary users, and the fact that Tracker and CMF Collector on the same box were downright painful to use. Even Plone has major speed issues on that box. Roundup is still delightfully fast. We've done a few simple customizations, and I continue to be impressed with its flexibility. Taking some cues from the Fresco project's Roundup instance, I've added in some new classes to group issues together under a Project. I've also added in some simple color coding to the 'status' column of our tabular views, which is useful on the Project view - if everything is green, we're good to go. Simple things, but with so much going on right now it's nice to finally have a place to go to keep tabs on what's going on and what's coming up.
Dave Hyatt, now one of the core developer's on Apple's Safari web browser, has posted an excellent read about tabbed browsing - covering various user interface issues and different virtues and problems that exist with all current implementations.
When I use Safari (which lately has only been at home - Safari v60 has some weird network bugs that make it difficult to use with many dynamic sites and servers, it seems. I've stuck with the previous beta (v52) on my iBook and iMac), I don't miss tabbed browsing. But, due to the Safari v60 issues I just mentioned, I've gone back to using Chimera (and am looking forward to using Camino 0.7 tomorrow) at work, and have fallen into the land of tabs again. Usually, I have our issue tracker open in one tab, the Zope management screens for whatever project I'm working on at the moment in another. Rarely do I use other tabs now, although sometimes I keep a Zope Error Log reporter tab close at hand (in Safari, I usually keep a minimized dock window for this purpose).
One thing that I have noticed since going back to tabs is that there are problems with the UI. I'm used to using command-tilde to cycle through open windows in Mac applications. Sometimes, I cycle through my Chimera windows rapidly looking for my Zope Management screens and wonder why I'm not seeing it. Only after a couple of cycles do I realize that it's in one of the windows, but in another tab then the one being shown. So it's command-tilde to switch windows once or twice, and then the command-shift-[ (or command-{ ) to switch tabs when I land in the right window. It's a mild annoyance, but it's happening to me a lot lately.
Which is why I think Dave's post about various tabbed browsing implementations is such an interesting read. Tabs are handy, but their UI can be awkward. So, I remain on the fence now. If tabs show up in Safari (and the issues that I've reported to Apple, especially about v60) get addressed, I'll use them. If the few bugs with Safari get fixed and it stays lean, easy, and fast even without tabs, I'll use it without.