Pixel Pushing Monkey

QuickSilver, for those who are unfamiliar, is one of the greatest software utility on Mac. On its most basic level, it is a text-based application launcher. With some experience with its more intricate features, you can select and copy multiple files from different locations, append text into files, create drawers for multiple copy and paste as well as storing text clippings. Some people would go as far as getting rid of OS X's dock altogether and base their entire workflow on just QuickSilver alone.

In the past year though, the development of QuickSilver came to a grinding halt. It was put into the open source community but received very little attention since. The original developer of QuickSilver now works for Google's Mac division, and has been focused on other projects. So imagine my excitement when I came across the article on Smoking Apples Blog that the same developer has unveiled his latest project, Google Quick Search for the Mac.

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I've been using Firefox 3 beta for a while now, and it's a definite improvement in memory usage and speed over Firefox 2. As expected, it's taking some of the addon developers quite a while to write new versions of their addon that's compatible with Firefox 3.

Granted, I don't use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn't live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It's also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog - Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it's been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

Google's Open Handset Alliance is exciting, because geeky programmers around the world just all simultaneously orgasmed and are now struggling to hold their drool inside what is presumed, to be their oral cavity. To be frank, that was not my first response to the announcement. I had a really, really busy day at work when Google hit the press; so my first impression was, "Oh, there are some new info on the Googlephone, great!"

It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, "Wait, is that all there is to this news? That's it? Really? You mean, I didn't miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance.... and... really? That's it?" For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol' me.

The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a "mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source"? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google's announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot more money than open source Linux companies that's been trying to figure out how to make any money at all by doing, anything and everything?

Of course you'll see an impressive list of partners, it's Google for god's sake! Everyone jump in the pool! The question is, how many of those partners really have any product development plans? How many of those partners will be looking for their own competitive advantage once the SDK is out? How many of those partners will actually, actively contribute to the initiative once they realized that they are at very high risk to put themselves out of business?

The answer for now is, "It's Google, they'll make it work." We'll see what develops in the coming months. I see it as Google just throwing a piece of SDK out there, and allowing the sharks to battle it out for supremacy. After all, taking this strategy really means they have very little stake in any particular company. It's a smart way to position themselves, as a software platform provider that doesn't really care which hardware wins out. If Sony Ericsson develops something great and put HTC out of business, so be it. If Nokia collapse (well, they haven't made a commitment to the consortium at all yet, probably a smart move at this point for them), it really doesn't matter to Google either.

I'm starting to see a bunch of executives & software engineers from companies gather at a coliseum built in Google's backyard (or maybe by naval airbase or something), and someone from Google is sitting atop in the Emperor's seat and just giggling at the bloodshed that's about to happen.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that Google is going about this. In fact, it's probably the smartest thing they could do to get into the mobile device arena without actually becoming involved in it. The style just disagrees with me on a personal level. I like companies that design end-to-end solutions that satisfies consumer needs. For example, Tivo is a great company that threw themselves into the heat of the battle, and forever changed the way we interact with televisions.

That kind of a company earns my respect. Google's Open Handset initiative makes me wonder, "Is this just going to be a Linux version of Windows Mobile?"

This past week, Microsoft's Mac development team announced that a real document converter, that will allow old versions of Office users to convert to new versions of Office 2007 format, will not be released until after Mac Office 2008 is complete. It was a choice of using existing resources to focus on releasing Office 2008 for Mac on schedule, rather than delaying it to get the converter out.

A few weeks prior, Apple made a similar announcement in regards to OS X. In order to get iPhone delivered and out on the market on time, they had to shift resouces from the OS X team to work on the iPhone. Therefore, they had to delay the release of OS X until after iPhone.

The general reaction to both of these events are about the same, although Apple's announcement created a much more visible ripple through news coverage (and understandably so). Most people would think, a company with the size, resource as Microsoft and Apple, shouldn't have any issues simply pulling in new resources and get the software released on time. Having gone through the responsibilities of finding new hire and contractors myself, I can sympathize with the difficulty of simply bringing in new resources. It's never as easy as finding qualified people and bringing them in.

Besides the process of finding and filtering through the number of talents out there available, you have to find the one that culturally fits into the company's general atmosphere. That process in itself can take more than a few weeks. Multiple interviews are scheduled with each interviewee, each person in the process will take up at least half of a work day. If you were lucky enough to find someone who is equally qualified in both skill set and personality (usually you end up with more of one, or not enough of the other), it will take anywhere between a week to a month to integrate the new hire into the processes of your workflow.

All in all, for just one new hire into an established team, you're looking at a hiring and development cycle that ranges anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 months. Not to mention that getting the new hire attuned, probably takes attention and time away from the rest of your team. By the time that new hire is an active, autonomously contributing member of your team, you're looking at 2 months down the road.

This situation is even worse when you're dealing with short-term hires to finish specific projects. You need to ramp them up to speed to finish the project on time, then after the project is done, you have to figure out if the long term plan of your company justifies keeping that person on tab. The obvious solution is to not make any permanent hires, and simply contract out the work. However, the process of finding a contractor, and maintaining the relationship with the contractor isn't any easier than finding a permanent hire.

It's easy to criticize these companies for not expanding resources to get their products out on time. The question is, would you rather put up with shoddy quality on the final product because of improper resource expansion? Under the same situation, I would always choose to maintain the quality of the product, rather than the schedule of the product.

For many Mac users, QuickSilver is one application they can't do without. It's one of those amazingly simple application that be can extended to be extremely powerful, but still elegant enough to be used for its most basic function as a program launcher. It's also one of those software that permanently changes an user's behavior in how they interact with an operating system forever.

As I was listening to Windows Weekly podcast this morning, I found out that Leo Laporte had gotten a new sponsor (for at least this episode) that makes a software called "Engage". It offers a bit of the same functionality as QuickSilver for those envious Windows users. Although most likely, Windows users never knew such an approach to program launcher existed, but Mac users dual-booting or virtualizing Windows on their machine is probably incredibly frustrated every time they had to reach into that Start Menu. It is still far less powerful than QuickSilver in terms of extensibility and integration via plugins into other programs, but at least it's better than the bare minimum Start Menu that Windows comes with.

Engage - the automatic start menu organizer

Apple announced today that Leopard is going to be delayed (via TUAW) until October because of the focused effort in getting iPhone out in time.

Personally, I think the delay doesn't really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there's nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren't any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren't any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, "I wish MacOS had this..."

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple's continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It's funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job's return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990's for Apple).

This is a really old ad from MacAddict way back when (btw, the magazine was recently renamed as well). Time is quite unkind...

The Original Apple Vs. PC Guy Ad

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that's been driven to Mac by the disappointment of Windows Vista.

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
MIT writer says Vista drove her to Mac

And the original article here:
Uninspiring Vista

Yay! I'm not alone! We should start a whole new subculture of "users driven to Mac by Vista" under the broader big-brother branch of the Mac culture.

From a person who complains about the nuisances... well, just about anything, would you expect anything less? Every product, may it be a car, my choice of toothpaste and shaving cream, and as incredulous as it may sound, even my computers (that includes both my of choices in Mac & PC) are far from the utopian world where flawless products prosper.

So here are a few annoyance that I've found with my Mac:

• The Finder -
  The Finder is an adequate file management system. Part of my unhappiness with it is due to my experience with Windows Explorer for the past several years. Although Windows Explorer has its share of flaws, both file management system can take a few tips from the other. Although the more time I've spent with Finder, the more familiar and comfortable I became. It is also quite apparent that since moving to the Mac, I tend to interact with files a lot less with Finders than individual applications. For example, organizing my photos is done through iPhoto, music through iTunes. However, this also brings me to the next caveat...

Despite those complaints, the nuisances that I'm experiencing with OS X are far less troublesome than I had with Windows. I had installed Windows XP on this machine in Bootcamp, anticipating needing to run some Windows app at some point. I also pondered getting Parallels. The truth is, I haven't found any software in Windows that I can't find a replacement for in OS X. Often times the replacement software is much more intuitive than its Windows counterpart (that's entirely another blog entry, eh?). The only thing I wish I can do is run Windows games, and I haven't found a single game that really makes me want to dual-boot back to Windows at all.

I heard rumors that Parallels is working on getting game API calls routed through their virtual machine. There has always been such software for Linux to get Windows games to play within Linux. So... I guess that day will come.. eventually.

Although it isn't perfect in the world of Mac, it's close enough to convince me to get a Macbook Pro to go with my quiet behemoth at home.

This year's Macworld keynote was all about the iPhone, and a bit about appletv. Despite that the next release of OS X, Leopard, is pretty much around the corner (anywhere between now and summer?), there had been very little talk about Mac at all.

Part of that may just be Apple is very satisfied with where Mac hardware & software is right now, and any model changes & upgrades wouldn't require such a big announcement at Macworld. I think part of the reason may also be article like this one in Information Week:

"Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X. Have they succeeded at both? I'd argue that the former's almost a non-issue: Vista will sell well, because the world won't have a choice. As far as the latter, well, probably, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Vista's better than Mac OS X."

"Windows is...well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout...who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans."

"This kind of "change for change's sake" is all over Vista. The window controls in Vista are smaller and flatter than in XP, and unlike XP, don't reach all the way to the top of the window anymore."

"For example, in Windows XP you have a control panel called "Add or Remove Programs." While not elegant, it is clear. You know what that control panel's functionality is, no guessing. It adds and removes programs. The Vista version? "Programs and Features." Huh? What does that do?"

This article goes into a good amount of detail, including some comparative screenshots, and echos my sentiment about Windows Vista. It's just not good enough to be "competitive", but it's still better than Windows XP.

Read more at Information Week:
Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista