PCalc 2.2
July 30th, 2010 at 7:51 am
PCalc 2.2 for the iPhone just appeared in the App Store. It’s not a big upgrade, but it does have a few new features I like.
First is a new theme, called Flynn. I can’t imagine myself ever using it, but it’s definitely fun.
I’m thinking James Thomson should have timed the release of this theme closer to December 17, but what do I know about marketing? Maybe he can do some cross-promoting with the publisher of LightBike.
On a more substantive note, PCalc’s Key Click preference now allows you to set the volume of the click.
If you’re like me and need to have the phone’s main volume set high to hear the phone ringing in your pocket but don’t like the extra loud clicks when tapping keys, this option is most welcome. And Nigel Tufnel fans will appreciate what happens when you swipe the volume slider all the way to the right.
Finally, PCalc’s advanced settings now have an option, called Clear Memories On AC, that prevents mistaken taps on the AC button from clearing out the memory as well as the stack. This duplicates some functionality, but makes the app work better without messing up its aesthetics.
PCalc already had an SC button for clearing the stack only, but because it was on the “2nd” keyboard, it required two keypresses instead of one. Personally, I always thought the SC key should be on the primary keyboard because it’s less destructive, but I understood the value of having a familiar key as the default. With the new setting, we get the best of both worlds. (There’s an MC key on the secondary keyboard for clearing the memory.)
To me, this is the biggest and best change. I often find myself with a bunch of items on the stack that I’d like to blow away, and I’ve always had to think twice before clearing to make sure I didn’t also delete an important number in memory. With the new setting I can AC with impunity.
Yes, I’ve written an absurd number of posts on PCalc. I’m an engineer; calculators are important to me.
WordPress and Akismet hate me
July 29th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
I’ve been unable to post comments on WordPress blogs, and I don’t know why.
Now it’s true that this is a WordPress blog and I can comment here, but that’s an exception—presumably because I’m the administrator. At every other WP blog, my comments go off into some netherworld.
I first noticed it a few weeks ago at Lawyers, Guns and Money. My comment had a couple of links in it, so I figured LGM was filtering links and didn’t think any more about it. A week later I tried to comment again—with no links this time—and was rebuffed again.
Well, rebuff isn’t quite the right word. When I hit the Publish button, the response is perfectly normal…except that my comment never appears.
Last week I tried a comment at Tom Levenson’s Inverse Square Blog. No luck. I asked Tom via Twitter if my comment had been classified as spam, and he told me it was nowhere to be found. Tom took my comment via email and has since posted it himself; this is very nice of him, but I should be able to post comments on my own.
Figuring this was an Akismet problem (Akismet is a spam filtering service set up by the WordPress people; because it’s easy to install, I suspect most WordPress blogs use it), I went to their contact page to plead my case. Twice. Still haven’t heard back from them, not even an autoresponse.1
I’ve had no luck Googling my problem. I read somewhere that going to podz.wordpress.com can tell you if you’re on Akismet’s shit list, but all I get from it is Checking…
Today’s was the weirdest experience. I tried to leave a comment at Clark’s Tech Blog. As expected, it didn’t appear. I emailed Clark and asked him to look for it in the spam bucket; as with Tom, it wasn’t there.
I tried to comment again (not sure why). Independently, and at almost the same time, Clark upgraded his blog to WP 3.0.1 (just released today), and both my comments suddenly appeared!
So maybe it’s a problem with WP 3.0, not Akismet? Maybe it’s some interaction between the two that got fixed in the latest point release?
I have been able to comment again at Clark’s place, so that’s a good sign. On the other hand…
I went back to Inverse Square to try again. The comment failed in the usual way, but I don’t know for sure whether it’s running 3.0.1. It’s hosted at wordpress.com, so it’s likely to get the latest and greatest version of WP shortly after it’s released, but maybe it’s still too soon. And there’s no way to know when self-hosted blogs like LGM will get around to upgrading.
The unreasonable effectiveness of mice
July 28th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
I don’t want to turn this into an input devices blog, but Andy Ihnatko’s post on the Magic Trackpad—which, curiously, didn’t show up in my RSS reader until this morning—got me thinking. I still don’t think the Magic Trackpad is right for me (see this discussion), but he does identify an interesting niche for it. And I started wondering why I feel certain I—and most other people—will be sticking with a mouse.
Here’s the key paragraph in Andy’s post:
AppleTV just got realllllllllly interesting. Existing AppleTVs — the one Apple product you’ve forgotten about, the one that sits at the back of the class and never raises its hand — are MacOS devices. They’re controlled via IR remotes and thus they require line-of-site between the device and the operator. With the Magic Trackpad in the product lineup, Apple could completely reinvent the AppleTV as a device that hides somewhere behind your TV, runs a new flavor of iOS, and ships with a Magic Trackpad instead of a clickybutton remote.
A Magic Trackpad—small(ish), wireless, and with no need for a surface to sit on—would be a great input device for AppleTV. You’d need to have the Tap to Click feature turned on because normal clicking is done by depressing the trackpad’s feet, which wouldn’t work if you’re on the couch or sitting in your recliner.1
I’m skeptical that the next AppleTV will be an iOS device, though. I know this is a popular rumor, but I don’t see it. Apple’s stated roadmap for iOS is to unify it over the 4.x series, eventually getting the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad all running the same version. Making an iOS-powered AppleTV would throw a monkey wrench into that plan, because it would require an onscreen pointer. Current iOS devices don’t need a pointer because your finger is right there touching the screen. When you’re operating a TV, and your finger is on a trackpad on the other side of the room, you need to see something on the screen that mimics the motion of your finger. I don’t believe Apple wants to put a pointer in iOS.
Regardless of the underlying operating system, with the right UI software, a trackpad would be a great TV input device.
So why don’t I think a trackpad will be great computer input device? I can’t quite put my (ahem) finger on it, but I think it has something to do with levels of abstraction.
When the Mac first came out, much was made of the notion that you used the mouse to manipulate items in your computer directly. This wasn’t true, of course, but it did make you feel closer to the machine because your previous computer work had been mediated through a keyboard,2 typing in cryptic commands. The mouse was, in fact, just another type of mediation, an abstraction. You were moving this plastic brick around on your desk to get an arrow to move around on the screen.
Despite the abstraction, there was something very right about the mouse. In a short time, mice were a common sight. Even before Windows was usable,3 people were using mice with character-based DOS shells like Norton Commander. Sometime in the early 90s, it became unthinkable for a desktop personal computer to ship without a mouse.
Other pointer devices have come and gone, but the mouse has stayed around in basically the same form it started with over a quarter of a century ago. Switching from mechanical to optical encoding was a big improvement in reliability, but it didn’t change how you used the mouse. The proliferation of buttons and the addition of a scrollwheel, no matter how successful they may have been, were really just tweaks.
Manufacturers have tried to come up with something better than a mouse. Graphics tablets have had their niche among artists and designers for years, but if they were going to spread to the general user, they would have done so by now. Laptop computers have seen the most experimentation with mouse substitutes, for the obvious reason that it’s really hard to use a mouse on your lap. Everyone seems to have settled on the trackpad as the best laptop pointer device—and it is much better than what came before—but most people still prefer to use a mouse when they can.
If you believe that removing layers of abstraction between the computer and the user makes for a better interface, you would think the trackpad would come out ahead of the mouse. With a trackpad, your finger is moving the onscreen pointer; the motion isn’t being mediated through a plastic brick. Why, then, the continued success of mice? Why isn’t Logitech in the trackpad business?
I think the problem with the trackpad is that it falls into a sort of uncanny valley between the touchscreen and the mouse.
With a well-made touchscreen, the behavior is almost physical. You touch the items and move them around; you pinch and pull to resize. In every case, you see your fingers right on the thing being manipulated, and it seems natural.
With a mouse, your hand is off to the side moving an object around on your desk to change things up on the screen—the whole business is more abstract. But somehow, the unrealistic motion of your hand matches up with the fact that the effect it’s having is a foot or two away. I can’t say that this feels natural, but it does feel right.
The trackpad uses the touchscreen’s natural finger movements, but has them tied to a screen some distance away. It works OK—I’m using a trackpad right now, and it’s just fine—but its mixture of the real and the abstract isn’t quite as good as the mouse’s more fully abstract behavior.
I don’t want to come off as a trackpad hater; I’m not. At the moment, it’s the best pointer device we have for laptops. I just don’t see it replacing the mouse on my desktop.
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Prepositions are funny, aren’t they? If I had written in the couch or on the recliner, you’d have done a double-take. With a chair, you can sit in it or on it—in is more common, but on is common enough—but when that chair turns into a recliner, you have to be in it. ↩
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Yes there were mice before the Mac, but they weren’t in wide use. Joysticks were also used to move onscreen pointers around, but they didn’t have the direct feel of mice. ↩
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That joke is too easy; don’t bother. ↩
Markdown footnotes bundle for TextMate
July 28th, 2010 at 8:11 am
There was a recent discussion on the TextMate mailing list about automating the creation of TextMate footnotes. Stephan Hugel, who started the discussion, likes having his footnote text at the bottom of the document and wanted some command/snippet/macro system that would do most of the fiddle work for him. I pointed out my Markdown reference link system for TextMate and suggested how it could be modified to do what he wanted. You can read about it by following the discussion thread. I won’t recapitulate it here, because that particular way of doing footnotes isn’t to my taste. I do, however, have a couple of footnote-making automations that I’d like to share.
First, you should recognize that footnotes aren’t a part of the official Gruber Markdown. They are, however, included in several Markdown variants/extensions, including Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra and Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown.
Here’s an example of footnote syntax:
* First, it's kind of backwards. You do the footnote text first,
then set the position of the marker. I find this perfectly natural,
but you may think it's weird.
* Second, it replaces whatever was on your clipboard with the
marker. This doesn't bother me because I use [Jumpcut][8], a
[multi-clipboard tool][9] that saves the last 40 text clippings.
If you don't use a utility like Jumpcut, you'll find this
behavior *really* annoying.[^multiclip]
[^multiclip]: But you really should be using a multi-clipboard tool.
It makes working with text so much easier.
The footnote marker is placed where the [^marker] is, and the text of the footnote is the paragraph that starts with [^marker]:. The footnote text can go anywhere in the document; it can even be intermixed with reference-style links down at the bottom, although in my opinion that makes for an unreadable mess. I tend to put my footnote text just after the paragraph with the corresponding marker.
To semi-automate the insertion of footnotes, I use a snippet and a macro, which you can download in this zipped TextMate bundle. The source code of the snippet is just
[^${1:marker}]$0: ${2:Footnote}
The marker (default value: marker) is the first tab stop and the footnote text (default value: Footnote) is the second. Tabbing a third time puts the cursor at the end bracket of the marker, which is where the macro expects to start. The Tab Trigger for this snippet is, in a nod to LaTeX, fn.
The macro is similarly trivial. It selects the text from the current position (just after the marker’s end bracket if you invoke it right after the snippet) to the beginning of the line (just before the marker’s start bracket), copies it to the clipboard, and sets the cursor at the beginning of the footnote paragraph. The marker is now on the clipboard, ready to be pasted wherever I want to put it. The Key Equivalent for this macro is ⌃⌥⌘F.
You should note two things about this method of doing footnotes:
- First, it’s kind of backwards. You do the footnote text first, then set the position of the marker. I find this perfectly natural, but you may think it’s weird.
- Second, it replaces whatever was on your clipboard with the marker. This doesn’t bother me because I use Jumpcut, a multi-clipboard tool that saves the last 40 text clippings. If you don’t use a utility like Jumpcut, you’ll find the loss of your previous clipboard really annoying.1
If these caveats don’t bother you, install the Markdown Footnotes bundle and give it a try. If you do a lot of footnotes, it can save you some time.
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But you really should be using a multi-clipboard tool. It makes working with text so much easier. ↩
Magic feet?
July 27th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
From Dan Frakes’s article on the Magic Trackpad (via Daring Fireball):
My favorite Magic Trackpad design feature? While the Magic Trackpad may not appear to support physical “clicking,” it indeed does: The two nubby, rubber feet on the bottom, along the front edge, actually have buttons built into them. When you press down on the trackpad surface, the feet “click,” giving you the same tactile sensation as you get with Apple’s current MacBook trackpads. Very clever, and a welcome Apple touch—no pun intended—for those who hate touch-tapping.
Putting the sensor in the feet is indeed clever, but it’s not an “Apple touch.” As explained in excruciating length in this post, my several-years-old Conair bathroom scale has not just simple click sensors, but true force gauges in its feet. All four of them.
And it comes with its own display, runs for years on a couple of button batteries, and probably cost less than $69 back whenever the hell it was we bought it.
Magic, Inc.
July 27th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I know it’s wrong to judge a product before using it, but I can’t help thinking that Apple’s new Magic Trackpad is a cool accessory that I will be avoiding like the plague.
In the first place, I don’t understand the appeal of a trackpad on a desktop computer. On laptops, they’re certainly they’re an improvement over the old PowerBook scrollball and the ThinkPad clitoris, but they’re not nearly as good—not nearly as tactile—as a well-designed mouse. Whenever I need to do a lot of work on my old iBook, I bring out a mouse and plug it in. It’s just better than a trackpad.1
The rollout of the Magic Trackpad and my painful experience with the Magic Mouse last year lead me to wonder whether Apple will ever again make a pointer device that I can live with. I actually like the Apple (née Mighty) Mouse,2 but I’m afraid its days are numbered as Apple slowly turns its entire product line iPhonesque.3
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Yes, I know the newer trackpads are much more capable than the one on my iBook G4. I’ve tried the new ones; they’re still not as good as a mouse. The Touch interface is great when your fingers are on the screen with the objects you’re manipulating—not so good when they’re two feet away. ↩
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I know most people hate the Apple Mouse because its scrollball attracts debris and is a pain in the ass to clean. There’s no question but that Apple should have made it cleanable. Still, I find it a pleasure to use and, before the Magic Mouse was introduced, had some hope that Apple would fix its problems in a later revision. Now it’s the redheaded stepchild of the Apple lineup and will probably be dropped as the company goes all Touch. ↩
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Despite my tendency to wander off on tangents, I believe this is the very first post in which my footnotes are as long as than the body text. ↩