The L&L Blog
The Mac is back... to Apple
Sigh... UPS just came around to take my MacBook back to Apple - again. I do hope they fix everything this time around - the discolouration, the poorly fitted replacement top-case, the chip they caused in the polycarbonate and so on. I don't have particularly high hopes, but at least they are trying to do something about the whole mess. It does mean that I am back on my beloved iBook for a few days, but I do miss the lovely keyboard of my MacBook, not to mention the glossy screen. (A lot of people were very upset that the MacBook had a glossy screen, but I actually prefer it.)
Edward Wheatley of Norfolk
Edward Wheatley of Norfolk, wherever you are, I salute you for your hilarious parody of antiquated and anachronistic attitudes in your letter to the Sunday Times of 9th July, 2006! It perfectly captures the sort of thing you might have expected a Daily Mail reader to have written twenty years ago. Ha! Oh, hold on a minute. You weren't being serious, were you?
"The problem with Saxondale (BBC2) is that it is simply not funny. But, of course, it's not meant to be. Like so much comedy, its purpose is not to amuse a mass audience but to impress the writers' friends, demonstrate their "right-on" credentials to students and win prizes from gullible judges. How much better it would be had these writers and their target audience done national service rather than gone to university."
- Edward Wheatley, Norfolk
Yes, because national service clearly did you the world of good, didn't it? Quite honestly, I think that anybody who can possibly suggest that the best strategy for sorting out the world's ills is to put guns in the hands of the younger generation and train them to think like sheep and shoot Johnny Foreigner is clearly pathological and should be locked up for everybody's sake.
That said, I often think of the inverted "Assylum" in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. The number of toothpick-like triggers out there is accumulating exponentially on a daily basis (if this last part means nothing to you then your life is impoverished but you can fix it immediately: go out and read the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy collection - now).
Interface/off
Yeah, that entry title has nothing to do with much other than being a pointless pun on the word "interface" and the film "Face/Off" (and as if it wasn't pointless enough to begin with, I've just exacerbated the the whole pointlessness with a pointless explanation).
M for Mac Junkies
I am a Mac-user. Obviously, or I wouldn't be developing an application in Cocoa for OS X. I like OS X. Actually, I love OS X. OS X is a wonderful operating system. And Apple machines look rather nice. THIS DOES NOT MAKE APPLE COMPUTER INFALLIBLE. It just means they have some good software engineers and designers. Okay. There, I said it. Now go ahead and flame me all you want.
Again and again I am baffled by the fanboy-ism of a certain breed of Mac user. This is, I know, only a sub-species of Mac user which just happens to be the most vocal. They no doubt emerged from the same shallows of the gene pool as did PlayStation and Xbox fanboys who have endless slanging matches about which console is "best". They do Apple no favours. Such fervent and inherently irrational devotion to a computer manufacturing corporation put me off buying a Mac for years. (I still feel queasy if I have to step into the Apple church of Scientology, sorry, I mean Regent Street store.) The quiet majority are a much better advertisement for Apple; I doubt you will ever find Phillip Pullman on a forum accusing anybody of being a Microsoft troll merely for stating that they have a problem with an Apple product, as did one poster to the Apple support forums today:
"Quite honestly I think a majority of the complaints are coming from non-Mac users who have infiltrated these newsgroups. As an OS/2 advocate for many years I was always under attack by Microsoft fanatics masquerading as OS/2 users. Their intent is to scare or drive people away from one OS and to their chosen product. Microsoft was actually found, at one time, to have paid employees to do such work... So don't pay much attention to them."
Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me... Whenever I post on that forum, I feel that I have to balance any problems I have with my machine with praise for Apple, lest I am flamed for daring to imply that a single Apple machine out there might not be perfect. I confess that there are times when such users, and Apple's attitude to its users and the press, make me think about returning to a PC just to be away from such ugliness of attitude. Of course, such madness is only momentary: one look at OS X, or at the Cocoa support forums, where Apple software engineers such as Douglas Davidson, John Randolph and Ali Ozer all give support to programmers for free, reminds me that I could never return to Windows. But like I say, such users do Apple no favours.
Meanwhile, the new top case to my MacBook - which was replaced because the old one suffered from the discolouration problem - seems to be, er, suffering from some minor discolouration already. It was only replaced three days ago, and already, if I look at it from an angle, I can see a yellow-ish patch which I cannot clean off. It seems that Apple are aware of the problem and have taken a decision to replace affected top cases but still haven't tracked down the root cause. Great.
Development Continues
Development is going well on Scrivener beta RC1 (ie. what will become release candidate 1). At the moment, I have the main interface laid out; next comes all the finicky getting-the-data into the interface, but of course, most of the code is already written and lying around in Scrivener Gold and (the unreleased) Scrivener 0.30b, so a lot of it will be cut and paste, optimisation and refinement. A quick and very blank shot of how things are looking so far:
Apple "Repair"...
Well, after much moaning to AppleCare, they finally agreed to take my MacBook in and replace the top-casing, which has suffered from the infamous "discolouration" issue - it seems that Apple are finally starting to take this seriously. And I have to say that the AppleCare service was quite amazing. They agreed to take my machine in for repair on the Friday. A box arrived with TNT the following Tuesday, and TNT took it away there and then. Apple repaired the machine on the Wednesday and I received it back on the Thursday (today) - fantastic. Except...
Except that the "repair" seems a bit of a botch-job to me. I don't think it's being too fussy or anal to expect a near-perfect machine from the get-go for nearly £1,000. It looks like Apple may disagree, though... They have indeed replaced my top-casing with a lovely new, pristine white one. However, they have only replaced the plastic around the keyboard. I naively assumed that they would also replace the plastic around the screen while they were at it, given that they are made of the identical material. But no such luck. The plastic right around the iSight camera is starting to discolour where my thumb lifts up the lid. It's not very noticable as of yet, but then my thumb only comes into contact with it several times a day, whereas my palms were in contact with the palm-rests for several hours. It doesn't take a genius (or a Genius) to work out that within a couple of months the plastic around the screen is going to look pretty shabby, too.
On top of that, the top-casing doesn't even seem fitted properly to me. It's certainly not flush against the polycarbonate case as it used to be. There is a millimetre gap between the top-casing and the polycarbonate in front of the left palm-rest and the trackpad. I can fit a thumbnail under there. All it will take is to catch it on something, and the plastic is going to get damaged - not to mention that dust is going to get under there.
And on top of that, the Apple engineers who replaced the top-casing obviously weren't too careful. There is now a small nick in the polycarbonate on the left of the keyboard, right next to the top-casing - obviously where they have used a screwdriver or something to prise off the old top-casing.
And if all that wasn't enough to weep into my bank statement, when I booted up my machine I found that everything was gone. It turns out that they replaced my hard-drive, too, as when they did lots of diagnostic tests before returning the machine to me, they found the original hard-drive was dodgy. Great! So now I have to reinstall everything, and I am really annoyed because there was one picture of Thurston that I used for my user account picture that I forgot to back up. Grrr.
Obviously, I called AppleCare about all of these issues about ten minutes after checking out the returned machine. Again I spoke to someone very helpful, although he told me that because the repair centres check over the machines very carefully before returning them to customers to try to ensure that they won't need to be returned for repair for anything else anytime soon, the fact that my machine had been returned to me probably meant that all the problems I have are considered "within spec" (which to me sounds horribly close to "it'll do"). He said he only knew of problems with discolouration of the top-casing on MacBooks, and not with the area around the iSight, and he wasn't aware that they are made of the same plastic (which seemed odd to me, given that he was the laptops expert - hey, he said "laptop", surely he must have meant "notebook"; these things are too hot to be "laptops"! It made me wonder if he had ever actually seen a MacBook, as it only takes one glance to see that the area around the screen is made of the same plastic as the top-casing...). Anyway, like I say, he was very friendly and helpful, and asked me to send him some photos of all my issues so that he could discuss them with engineering. He promised to get back to me next week, so I will just have to wait and see what happens.
To be honest, I could probably live with all these minor imperfections - the machine works, I can use it to develop and then use Scrivener quite happily. But why should I just "live with" a brand-new machine? After all the discolouration fuss, I think I'm entitled to a little perfection.
Rant Ends.
Of Corkboards and Typewriters
Okay, I've been playing around with this simplicity idea, and I'm going to experiment with it to see if it is a viable future for Scrivener. My idea is to have the main window look a little like the one in OmniOutliner. It displays either an outliner or a corkboard, with a drawer that can show the binder (yes, I know a lot of people don't like drawers and they could put off some potential users, but I do like the way they work in OmniOutliner). You could see a document in a third pane in that window, but only as a preview and with no meta-data. Then you would open any documents you wanted to work with in a separate window. These editor windows would have a drawer for displaying meta-data, and would also allow a split view for viewing supporting documents. Here are a couple of mock-ups of how it might look:
Simplicity (and the inspectors cometh)
I haven't got much time to do anything on Scrivener or the typewriter emulator this weekend. I wish the reason for this was that I am too busy enjoying Father's Day and spending quality time with T. and O., but no... It's actually because OFSTED have announced that they are inspecting our school this week, so all my plans and paperwork have to be spick and span, up-to-date and perfect, etc etc. Ugh.