If only built-in apps were allowed to bypass Mute, we would complain that developers couldn’t make useful alarm apps and Apple was being evil.

Trouble is, it’s only partially true that 3rd party apps can play noises if the mute switch is turned on. Apps that use background notifications for alarms, which is any alarm app worth a damn, can’t play notification noises if the mute switch is on and the app has been exited. However, if the app was the most recently used and you just hit the iPhone’s top “sleep” button, the app can still play noises. That must be what Marco means. I thought this was the case, based on my work on an alarm app that, sadly, changes in iOS 5 made impossible to ship. (Although as I write this I think I’ve thought of a workaround for the app I abandoned).

I also tested it out with Due and Night Stand HD.

The bottom line is that if you want a timer or alarm to go off and ignore the mute switch, no matter what, without worrying about it, you are stuck with the built in iOS Clock app. Which doesn’t suck for the end user, but it does suck for app developers who have ideas for better alarm apps.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the fall of 1996 (or was it winter 1997?) I was a freshman in college and got myself a copy of The Photoshop 3.0 WOW! Book and downloaded a working demo of Photoshop 3. It was a revelation. I had so much fun playing with that software and learning what it could do. I knew Photoshop 4 was on the way so I waited and pounced as soon as it was released. I think that with my student discount I was able to pick it up for around $270. Best money I’d ever spent. If you’ll recall, PS 4 was the first one to have layers. Yes, there were three versions of Photoshop that didn’t have layers. The excitement I felt about computers and creating things with computers was palpable. I still remember it clearly.

Sadly, today, for whatever reason, those feelings are a faint trace of what they once were. Part of it is because Photoshop CS5.1 is a bloated pile of crap that makes me hate life whenever I open it. In fact, I’ve given up on it and have switched back to CS4 as I patiently wait for a CS5.1 update that will take it from “total shit” to “usable, but still buggy.” Lion’s been out for months. I’m afraid an update to CS5.1 is hoping for too much. I hate Adobe.

However, there’s more to it than Photoshop itself being less fun to use. I think it’s because I’ve forgotten how to play. You know… Playing. Just for fun. Now, sadly, I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to apply whatever skills I have to making a buck or two. Because I have rent to pay and I have food to buy. I think it would be fun to dive into 3D, which is what I originally wanted to do when I was in high school. And video editing interests me. “But Erik,” my brain says. “Why? How are you going to make money with that?”

I expected to have this kind of problem at some point in my life. I was a photography major in college, but I had no interest in being a photographer professionally. I felt like that would kill the joy I get out of making photographs. If I had to make photos I didn’t like in order to please clients, it would suck some of the joy out of photography. And if I had to worry about selling photographs as art, I would end up making photographs I thought would sell rather than photographs I personally enjoyed making and looking at. In fact, the period where I temporarily dropped out of college was the time I was most excited about photography because I was only doing it for my own personal enjoyment. I was shooting what I wanted to shoot, not for projects the instructor doled out. Also, oddly enough, those months when I was shooting on my own for no one else but myself, I learned more than I ever did while in a photo class. I’ve never gone down the road of photography as a career and even though I go through periods when I don’t touch my real camera, I still enjoy photography because the only time I make pictures is when I want to make pictures.

With programming and doing creative work on the computer, I don’t have that anymore. It all feels like work. If I’m doing work on my computer, it’s either because it’s a project I have to do or I’d better be working on something that will damn well lead to money. And that sucks. Not being able to just mess around and play sucks. A lot.

I want to recapture the joy I felt when was first learning Photoshop and when I was first learning what HTML was. When, with no knowledge of JavaScript or CSS, I dissected the source code behind the Jaguar website circa 2000 (which was pretty bad-ass at the time) and used what I learned to make a portfolio site for myself. When I could play with images in Photoshop with no real objective other than learning, having fun, and making something cool to show my friends.

But I don’t know how to get that excitement back.

Yes, this is a downer of a post. I don’t have an uplifting ending to slap onto it. I won’t until I figure out how to have fun playing with a computer again.

How I Use TextMate Projects

In my root folder, alongside the src and build directory I have a ton of .tmproj‘s. The only difference between each one is the file that’s used at the base class and the name of the final product I’m building. Plus a flag for a specific build setting that I turn on and off depending on what I’m doing. I’ll often have two of these projects open at the same time, since I’ll need to alternate between building two different products quickly. And all of these project files share the same source files. They build to the same target directory. The only difference between them, as I said, is that they use a different file as its main, root class and the name of the final build product is different.

I don’t see how I can easily do this the new way, where projects and their root directory seem to be so tightly coupled. That is, each directory can only have one settings file. Where with TextMate 1, countless project files can live together in the same folder. Sure, I could have a bunch of lines in my new TextMate 2 project settings and simply uncomment the ones I need whenever I need to build a specific target. But this is a huge pain in the butt, especially if I need to work on two projects at the same time and quickly jump from building one to building the other.

Yeah, TextMate 2 is in a truly legit alpha state. And this certainly isn’t me ragging on it or complaining I can’t use an alpha to get real work done. But it seems like the new way for dealing with projects is more or less set in stone. Seems they decided they don’t like the old method. I’m also probably missing something about how to use these new .tm_properties to their full potential. I’ll certainly update this blog when I see the light and figure out how to do what I need to do. Perhaps you can help?

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

• You can’t change the document window size from all edges and corners anymore
• Every time the cursor transforms into a spinner it disrupts my train of thought because it’s just wrong to do that. No other app does that. Stop reinventing the wheel just because you think you can make the wheel look cooler, Adobe.
• Collapsing palettes requires a double click when it used to be a single click

UPDATE: Wednesday, December 7, 2011

I forgot out this one:

There is no reason for Photoshop to be using this external disk. None. But if I’ve got it plugged in and Photoshop is running, I can’t dismount it. How long has Photoshop CS5.1 been out? Over a year? And there are still bugs like this? And if you are going to blame it on Lion, it’s not like Lion was developed in secret without developer releases intended to find bugs before the real product hit the market. Adobe acts like it had never even heard of OS 10.7 when it was released and many Adobe apps broke in various ways.

UPDATE: Thursday, December 8, 2011

From time to time, Photoshop gets goofy and loses focus when I invoke Launchbar. Photoshop then gets hidden behind whatever app I was using right before Photoshop. Maddening!

And I can’t tell you how many times I create a selection or adjust a crop area to a precise size, say 56 pixels tall, and when I release the mouse to finishing making or adjusting the selection, it jumps to 57 or 55 pixels. Over and over again. Unpredictably. Forcing me to make the same selection six times before it’s finally correct. I’ve been using Photoshop since 1996 and this has never been an issue until CS5.1. Thanks for cutting my productivity in half and pissing me off in the process, assholes.

UPDATE: Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Sometimes masks stop appearing in the Layer’s palette. The masks still work, but they are totally blank in the palette.

“Save For Web…” also can’t decide when it should warn me that I’m saving over an existing file. Sometimes it warns me, sometimes it blows away the original file without letting me know it’s going it.

UPDATE: Thursday, December 15, 2011

Photoshop doesn’t play well with Exposé. Or even command-tab app switching. Often times when I command-tab from Photoshop to another app, a bunch of Photoshop docs will be sitting on top of windows/docs of the app I just switched to.

That issue I mentioned where marquee selections get adjusted a little when I release the mouse actually pertains to anything that involves dragging to make adjustments. Such as sliders. Get the slider perfect, then release the mouse, and the slider changed by a pixel. This is something that was never a problem in fifteen years of Photoshop use. Now it happens consistently. And it didn’t even happen with CS4 under Lion. How did Adobe fuck this up so badly?

“You don’t know that if they looked inside of your brain or mine right now what they would find.”

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman explaining that the evidence showing dead hockey players suffered brain damage, specifically chronic traumatic encephalopathy, from fighting, is inconclusive.

via The New York Times

I think what he meant to say is “You don’t know if they looked inside my head right now if they’d find a brain.”

The dude can’t even pronounce players’ names correctly and he’s being honored for his ability to talk. There’s a reason the FakeTimMcCarver Twitter account exists. I’m 99% sure some of those tweets are real quotes from the Hall of Fame broadcaster.

Done.

Today I have a new career goal: Get to a point where I no longer have to use software written by Adobe. Trying to get CS 5.5 to work like CS 4, finding areas where CS 5.5 is, beyond any doubt, worse than CS 4, and having spent nearly $500 (and this was with a 30% deal) for the privilege has raised my hatred of Adobe to eleven.

Take a look at the difference in “size on disk” and the number of items. git gc --aggressive is no joke!

Related: Compressing Git Repository

We’ve all been there at one time or another. I’m grateful that I’m not there right now.

Justin Vernon’s version of this song is great. And you can buy the song, and video, on iTunes.