But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.

Exactly. When Coda 2 was released, I had the option to buy it direct or via the Mac App Store. I chose direct, even though there was a feature or two that only worked in the App Store version. Which is another problem: Only apps from the App Store can take advantage of iCloud and, in OS X 10.8, Notification Center. Apple doesn’t have enough feet to shoot itself in right now. This cycle is bad for the App Store, iCloud, customers and developers. Oh, and Apple, too.

If you were to graph the price of something over time, it would make sense to have the date or time along the x-axis and the price on the y-axis. Let’s also say that you got price info at inconsistent intervals. So you have the price for November 17th, 23rd, 30th and then December 1st and 10th. It would make sense to have the plot points for November 30th and December 1st closer to each other than the plot points for November 17th and 23rd, right? One day is much less than six days and that can easily be expressed visually. Also, the horizontal spacing between December 1st and 10th should be greater than any of the others.

Why is this so hard to do?

Granted, I’m using Numbers, which probably isn’t nearly as powerful as Excel. But, based on a quick Google search or two, it seems like Excel isn’t much better at this.

It seems like this would be a common use case. Am I crazy? Am I just going about this the wrong way?

Update: Saturday, June 9, 2012

This post from early 2010 shed some light on the issue for me. The key is to use a scatter chart, then turn on connection lines between the data points. That gets me close enough to what I wanted.

The only type of chart that is a true X-Y plot is the scatter chart. It is the chart icon that looks like a shotgun blast. Your dates and the values must both be in data column, neither can be in a header column. After creating the chart, you will most likely have to go to the Metrics Inspector and rotate the X-axis labels (dates are usually too long to display horizontally). The chart plots data points. You can connect the points with lines in the Table Inspector.

The drive I bought is old, as far as SSDs go. But while a newer SSD might be twice as fast as this one in certain operations, this “old” SSD is going to be massively faster than the 512GB 5400RPM drive that’s been in my three year old MacBook Pro since day one. Not to mention the fact that my Mac is old enough that it doesn’t have 6G SATA built into it.

For the curious, I got the 240GB version. If you care, you can check out its price since late 2010. 240GB will be enough space for me. I’ve been keeping an eye on my disk usage for the past year or two to make sure of that. And I’m not going to baby the SSD by running some multi-drive setup that helps minimize the wear and tear on the SSD. Hell no. It’s going to be the one and only drive in my laptop. This particular drive has a good reputation for being reliable and durable, even under heavy usage. Performance degradation shouldn’t be a problem at all. I immediately regretted not ordering a cheap external case to hold the soon-to-be-homeless drive I’m pulling out of the laptop. The old 512GB drive will come in handy for backup. I might do a fresh install of Lion and user migration assistant. I might do a fresh install and migrate manually. I might just restore from a clone of my existing drive. Probably the latter, so I can get up and running as fast as possible.

Now to come up with some test to compare speed in real world scenarios…

1. Start up Splitcaster
2. Create a new race and hit the green START button
3. Now go back to the race settings screen by either tapping on the top of the stopwatch view (where the race name, athlete name and timers are) or the gear on the bottom right

You can now enter all the race info you want. Even if the race has begun and you’ve recorded some splits, you can still change things like the race distance and lap size. No more stressing out about getting the race settings perfect before the gun goes off!

1. You recorded a split on accident

We’ve all been there. The fact is, with the iPhone’s touch screen, it can be very easy to accidentally “press” a button. But it’s very easy to fix this. Swipe left or right on the split and the red DELETE button will appear. Hit that DELETE button and the errant split goes away. Or, you can tap on the split you recorded by accident to reveal the Split Detail screen. Then tap the trash can icon located at the bottom of the screen. Problem solved!

2. Splitcaster guessed a split distance incorrectly

One of Splitcaster’s strengths is that it lets you take splits when you want and it automatically labels the split distances for you. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes it will label a split distance incorrectly. The good news is that you can easily override the error and set the split distance manually. To do so, simply tap on the incorrect split to bring up the Split Detail screen. Then tap on either the Split Distance or Total Distance. From there you can set the distance manually. This is especially useful if you didn’t set a Goal Time in the race settings and then the first split you record wasn’t for the first full lap.

3. You hit SPLIT instead of STOP when the race ended

What do you do if you hit the SPLIT button when you meant to hit STOP when the race finished? Simple. Just hit the STOP button to stop the stopwatch. You’ll likely have the last two splits showing the same total distance. But the second-to-last split is the real finish. So just swipe to delete the last split you recorded when you hit STOP. Problem solved.

4. Things have gotten messy

Let me share a real world example that happened when I was timing races at the 2012 Payton Jordan meet. I was timing one of the women’s 5000m races and I hadn’t set a Goal Time. Since I was sitting at the finish line, I wasn’t recording splits for 400m, 800m, 1200m, etc. Instead I was recording splits for 200m, 600m, 1000m, etc. That’s no problem at all. But after recording the third split, I noticed that things were all screwed up. Splitcaster happily reported that the women were on pace for a finish time of around seven and a half minutes for 5000 meters! And my splits of 200m, 600m, and 1000m were labeled as 400m, 1200m, 2000m. Big problem? Not really. Fixing the error was actually very easy. All I had to do was tap on the first split I recorded. I then changed the split distance from 400m to 200m. Problem solved. Splitcaster corrected all the splits that came after that as well.

The Bottom Line: Experiment

Take a little time to experiment with Splitcaster. Make mistakes on purpose. Fix the mistakes. Doing so will make you understand how the app works. And the more you understand how it works, the more you can trust it and the more enjoyment you can get out of it. And the more likely you are to write ★★★★★ reviews on the App Store ;)

As you probably know, Splitcaster is smart enough to let you record splits when you want to. You don’t have to sign a virtual contract that says you will record splits when they cross the starting line every single time that they cross the starting line. If, for whatever reason, you want to take splits at 200m, 400m, 800m, 1000m and the finish of a 1600m race, Splitcaster will let you do just that. All you have to do is record a split whenever you please and Splitcaster will record the distance of the split. But to figure out the distance of a split, it needs to know a little bit about the pace the athlete is moving at. That’s where the Goal Time comes in. If you tell Splitcaster that you think the athlete will run the 1600m in 5:00 and then the first split you record is at :35.7 (looks like they went out a little fast!), Splitcaster will know that you must have recorded the split at 200m. Likewise, if you record the first split when the time is 2:35.2 (because you missed the first lap for whatever reason), Splitcaster will once again know that the distance for that split was 800m. But if you don’t enter a Goal Time, Splitcaster has to assume that the first split you record was for the first full lap.

So, the bottom line is this: You don’t have to enter a Goal Time. But if you leave it blank, try to remember to record the first split at the first full lap. It will make your life a little bit easier. Don’t worry too much about it, though, because fixing mistakes is very easy to do with Splitcaster.

For example: When a race is about to begin, press and hold the green START button. You’ll notice that the button has turned gray, indicating that it’s pressed down. Then, while you’re holding down the START button, keep your eye on the starter’s gun. As soon as you see smoke from the gun, release the START button. The same goes for taking splits. Press and hold the SPLIT button. Then wait for your athlete to start a new lap and simply release the button. You get the idea. Not only is this easier than keeping your thumb hovering over the button and blindly stabbing at it while you’re watching the race, it’s also more accurate because there’s less delay between something happening and you recording what happened.

One final note: What if you press a button and realize you don’t want to take any action? No problem. Just drag your finger far enough off of the button until it switches from gray back to its original color. No harm done.

You know the most amazing thing about this “product”? The voice recognition understood “Monsieur Gayno”!

I all seriousness, I think that this is silly. Silly because it’s something that doesn’t exist. It isn’t even close to existing. But the reaction people have is “Oo! Look at this thing that Google is going to come out with!” No, Google made a concept video. And that’s it. Google will never ship a product that does half of what this video is demonstrating.

Does this bring back memories for anyone else?

Speaking of bringing back memories, did you know that The 7th Guest is available in the iOS and Mac App Stores?

The “I’m eating at the table and want to prop up my iPad to read” test:

And the “I’m lounging on the couch and want to rest my iPad on my lap without it sliding around” test:

It passes the second test particularly well. The inner suede-y microfiber lining (which faces outward when the cover is flipped around) grips the material of my pants very nicely. $40 is pretty steep for this cover, but I’m feeling no regret whatsoever. Unless you are super concerned about protecting the back of iPad, I’d say that getting one of these Smart Covers is essential if you get an iPad.

The crowning achievement of the upcoming iPad is its ultra-high-resolution screen, by far the sharpest display of any tablet on the market. But Apple’s giant leap to the post-HD world is causing headaches for app developers and could end up disappointing consumers who’ve just shelled out $800 for a device that the company has dubbed “resolutionary.”

Okay, stop being hyperbolic. The iPad doesn’t cost $800. It has six pricing levels and only the highest, $829 for the 64GB model with 4G LTE wireless, is in the $800 neighborhood. But let’s see how this “resolutionary” screen will be disappointing for consumers, developers and Apple itself.

The problem for designers of iPad applications is two-fold: They’ll be working on screens with lower resolution than the tablets they are designing for. And apps already running on iPads may end up looking poorly on the next generation screens.

And…

“Day one on the iPad, everything graphical is going to look fuzzy,” said Matt McMillan, the Cambridge-based co-developer of the popular app CourseNotes. “It’s a matter of going through and upgrading all graphics. That probably will be a huge problem for us.”

The giant HD monitor that McMillan uses to design apps has a resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, far less than the upcoming iPad’s 2,048 by 1,536 pixels.

“That means when I’m designing for the new iPad I can’t even see everything,” he said. “I’ll have to just try to figure it out and hope they come out with some new desktop displays.”

Holy Christ. Where to start with this? I wanted to give McMillan the benefit of the doubt and say that Van Sack was taking his quotes out of context. But I don’t think that’s the case.

Issue One: Having a screen that doesn’t match the resolution of your target device or medium is a non-issue. It’s a “problem” people have faced since they started using computers to design anything. The simplest example I can give you is working with photographs. If you are working on a photo that’s going to be printed 8x10 inches at 300dpi, by McMillan’s logic, you’d need a screen that runs at 2400x3000 to handle the task. Sorry. You’re out of luck. McMillan’s head would explode if I told him I’ve worked on a few images that were printed 30x40 inches at 300dpi (9000x12000 pixels for those counting at home) on a 1280x1024 screen. Nevermind that fact that you can, and should, test your apps on the new iPad.

Issue Two: “Everything graphical is going to look fuzzy”? No, any custom graphics that you haven’t made double resolution assets for will look fuzzy. Text will look great. UIKit components will look great. On day one. Only custom graphics that you’ve created yourself will be fuzzy, and that’s only if you don’t have the high resolution versions ready to go. And if you don’t have them yet? If you’ve been blindsided by the announcement of a Retina screen for the iPad? If you don’t have a plan to create @2x graphics? You just might be an idiot who doesn’t deserve to be a successful iOS developer. Harsh? Yes. But true? Yes.

I can think of a reason developers might be concerned about the high resolution display. They might not like what these new high resolution assets will do to the size of their app. Bigger graphics means much larger file sizes. That might annoy some developers.

But that’s not all. “An analyst” has some bad news for Apple:

Richard Shim, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, thinks there’s another reason altogether that Apple may rue the day it decided to pioneer its so-called retina display screens.

Shim, a market analyst who focuses on the supply chain of manufacturing, says the screens are so hard to make that the providers are having difficulty coming up with the volumes that Apple has requested.

Manufacturers are having a hard time making the highest quality display ever created at volume? Shocking. But today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s run of the mill. Manufacturing will improve. Demand will be met. Maybe not in the first month or two. But manufacturing will catch up with demand. This is another non-issue.

Consumers aren’t going to regret buying an iPad because of its display. Apple won’t regret introducing this high resolution display. And developers who don’t have their heads in the sand aren’t worried about what will happen to their apps on the new screen.

Unfortunately, it looks like my suspicions were correct: it’s a novelty for shooting one type of photo, and not particularly usable for anything else. That’s too bad — I really thought the Lytro had more potential.

Marco Arment

You know what else sucked for the first few (actually, many) years they were on the market? Digital cameras. Every single digital camera was an over-priced toy that occasionally captured a decent image.

You’ve got two options, both of which involve editing the mm.cfg file, located in either your home folder or /Library/Application Support/Macromedia (or somewhere else on your system if you don’t have a Mac).

1. Set PolicyFileLog=0. That prevents the debug version of the Flash Player from making the file and logging to it in the first place.
2. Set PolicyFileLogAppend=0. That clears the file every time the Flash Player is relaunched.

Bam. Easy. You’re welcome.

Related: MDS Activity and Flash Player

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?