Rocksmith 2014

Rocksmith (2014...I never tried the original). Using a real guitar (or bass) means that it becomes less about playing a game and more about actually playing guitar (or bass). Of all the computerized guitar teachers or “Guitar Hero with a real guitar” things I’ve tried, this one seems to work the best. It is work to learn the songs, but it doesn’t feel like you’re fighting against the software to do so. And like a good teacher, instead of asking you what difficulty you want, as soon as you’re starting to feel comfortable, it pushes you just a little more.

I haven’t taken lessons in some twenty-odd years, but this software makes me feel like I am. In the best way.

CodeRunner

If you are a C++ programmer with a Mac, buy Nikolai Krill’s CodeRunner from the Mac App Store. It is great for banging out quick experiments. Pick C++, write the code, hit the run button.

It also does AppleScript, C, C#, Java, Javascript, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and shell scripts. And you can configure more yourself.

iWork

Why did Apple remove so many features from the Mac iWork apps? I don’t know, but here’s a guess.

Ive has now been put in charge of human interface for software as well as hardware. He brought a fresh pair of eyes to iWork and saw a lot of things that could be improved. (You might not agree that they are improvements, but I long saw things in Pages that I felt could be improved.) But he also lacked the experience of what customers wanted.

Combine that with the work to bring the Mac, iOS, and iCloud versions of the iWork apps closer together. The decision was made to move forward with these things, but to also—when installing the new iWork apps—leave the current ones installed for existing users who depend upon existing features. That will give them time to reassess those features, to be thoughtful about how they bring them to the new apps, and to take the time to implement them well.

File systems

“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”

It is well known that users have a difficult time understanding the standard, hierarchical computer file system. I wonder that’s really the case, though.

For example, the Mac—from the beginning—taught users how to use the file system though the Finder. The Finder was the Mac “shell”—the program the user used to get to and organize their documents and applications. But when the user interacted with the file system within an application, it presented it in a completely different way than the Finder did. This was always the biggest stumbling block I witnessed new users stumble over on the Mac. This dichotomy tended to be repeated in most GUIs that followed.

Perhaps the problem isn’t with file systems themselves but with the ways we’ve expected users to interact with them.

The screenshot above is not actually from fsn, which was used in Jurassic Park. It’s from fsv.

iMac vs iPad revisited

Back in 2010, I took a look at how many of the apps that I used on a daily basis on my Mac had an equivalent on my iPad. Let’s take a look at how things are different here in 2013.

Now, I use iMessages much more than AIM, and it has even replaced iChat on the Mac. (Though I do miss some iChat features.)

Besides third-party equivalents, there’s now an iPad version of GarageBand.

I now use UX Write more than Pages on my iPad. I actually use it a lot on my iPhone too. Since my favorite Mac HTML editor, Amaya, hasn’t been keeping up-to-date, I wish I had a Mac version of UX Write.

The iPad can now print.

There is a GuitarPro for iPad now. It is mostly for viewing, but it does have a decent notepad that can be used to write a bit of tab. Notion, however, is a full-fledged music engraving app for iPad.

While I’m not expecting an iPad version of DrRacket (née DrScheme) any time soon, Lisping is quite impressive. See also the Gambit REPL app for iPad.

Posts is a great app for writing and editing Blogger posts. I still have lots of problems with Blogger all around, but it is equally painful on both the Mac and the iPad now.

Another Mac app I use a lot is Terminal. (I use Cathode a lot too.) The iSSH iPad app and my Bluetooth keyboard have allowed me to telecommute with only my iPad.

I do my taxes with TurboTax on the iPad now instead of on the Mac.

Soulver is an app that I use a lot on Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Nearly all the graphics I create are made on the iPad with Inkpad. I don’t remember the last time I created a graphic on the Mac.

IMovie gets used the most on my iPhone.

Why I broke my skip-a-generation iPad pattern

So far, I’ve stuck to a skip-a-generation pattern with iPhones and iPads. With the arrival of my newer iPad 4†, I’ve broken that. Why?

1. If the iPad 3‡ had come in an 128GB model, I would have bought that. Between role-playing game PDF files, music recording, books, games, etc., I was already pushing up against the 64GB limit when I bought my iPad 3. Now that the iPad 4 comes in an 128GB model, it is time to upgrade.

2. My iPad has become my primary computer. My iMac and iPhone are the companions. So, if I’m going to upgrade any of them on a faster schedule, it should be the iPad.

3. My son is still using my iPad 1*, which is showing its age a bit quicker than previous iOS devices. The fact that it can’t run iOS 6 is probably more of a symptom of that than the cause. His younger sister got an iPad mini from Santa. So, this allows me to pass down the iPad 3 to him a little sooner than if I were to wait for an iPad 5 to appear.

†What Apple calls “iPad (4th generation)”

‡What Apple calls “iPad (3rd generation)”

*“iPad (1st generation)”

Guitar practice with the iPad

So, I have some songs arranged using Guitar Pro on my Mac. I drop them in a shared Dropbox folder to share them with my bandmates. I can then use the Dropbox app on my iPad to load them into the Guitar Pro iPad app.

The Guitar Pro app is great for learning and practicing. Besides showing notation, it’ll play the song plus the parts for other instruments. In my case, all the songs have guitar, bass, and drums. I can mute individual instruments. So I can have it play the guitar part—alone or with the other instruments—when learning the song. Then I can turn the guitar part off and just play with the bass and drum tracks while practicing. It can also adjust the tempo, so I can slow things down until I get the parts under my fingers.

The trouble with Guitar Pro, though, is that if you have a guitar amp/effects app—like AmpKit, AmpliTube, GarageBand, JamUp, &c.†—running in the background, Guitar Pro kills it when it starts playing.

Another app—TabToolkit, which was around before the Guitar Pro app—doesn’t suffer this problem. It can read Guitar Pro files too. TabToolkit doesn’t sound as good as the Guitar Pro app, though. At least, to my ears.

To practice with the Guitar Pro app, I instead have to use my Vox amPlug, Digitech RP-350 multi-effects pedal, or one of my Crate GTD15R amps. All of these have an “aux in”. Just connect the iPad headphone jack to that. Not as convenient and portable as just guitar, Apogee Jam, and iPad; but it works.

The same situation exists with iReal b and Chordbot. These are “band in a box” style apps where you enter a chord progression and it generates accompaniment for you. The iReal b app will kill a guitar effects app running in the background, but Chordbot won’t.

†In all of these apps, there’s a “run in background” option that you have to turn on for them to stay running when you switch to another app.

Browser/OS stats for this blog

I was looking through the blog’s stats, and the browser and OS stats seemed kind of interesting.

• 63% Firefox
• 15% Chrome
• 10% Safari
• 8% Internet Explorer

• 40% Macintosh
• 37% Windows
• 16% Linux
• 2% iPad
• 2% iPhone
• < 1% Android
• < 1% Other Unix

Based on what I’ve been seeing from more generic reports, that seems atypical. I’m surprised that Chrome isn’t closer to or a bigger percentage than Firefox. I’d expect Safari and IE to be reversed, but they are pretty close. It seems that fewer of my visitors who use Macs use Safari than I would’ve thought.

For this blog, that’s pretty much just trivia. If you are someone who has to make decisions based off this kind of data, though, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to collect your own data rather than relying on what others report. e.g. When I was in the shrink-wrapped software business, Macs made up a lot more of my company’s market than the general marketshare they held at the time.

My dream text editor and word processor

There’s a discussion on Branch about Your Dream Text Editor / Word Processor. I submitted an answer, but it won’t show up unless I get approved to join the branch. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be a way for me to see what I wrote until/unless I get added to the branch. Weird. (But then it took me a while just to figure out how to add the branch to my Branch “drawer”.) So, it goes here too.

My dream text editor would be mostly like Vim, but with Scheme underneath.

I’ve had to work on enough systems where vi was the only practical editor that I found it easier to use Vim on the systems where I could install something more powerful. I’ve really come to like it except for its ad hoc scripting language. I’d envy the Emacs people except that I think elisp would just annoy me by being almost Scheme. ^_^

My dream word processor would be something akin to Amaya or UX Write. I want the output to be clean HTML. I want to be able to do semantic formatting as I write without having to type raw HTML, LaTeX, or Markdown.

Plus I’d like a high quality HTML to PDF/print converter. HTML+CSS has features that ought to allow generating LaTeX quality print.

Linear

Here’s a tip for video/console/computer/iOS† game designers:

Free wandering doesn’t make linear gameplay non-linear.

Rather, adding free wandering to a linear game tends to be tedious at best and frustrating at worst.

†Is there a good general term to use here?

iOS project organization thoughts

There is one big thing I find missing when working on my iPad.

On my Mac, I might have a directory with these subdirectories and files.

• Skylands
  • For the players
    • Character Sheet.ink
    • Player Map.hxm
    • NPC Pictures
      • Abe the patron.jpg
      • Bob the retainer.jpg
      • Chuck the merchant.jpg
    • Q and A.html
    • Player Guide.pages
  • DM eyes only
    • Dungeon key.md
    • Dungeon map.ink
    • Reference.numbers
    • Secrets.md
    • Unmet NPC Pictures
      • Victor the minor villian.jpg
      • Xavier the major villian.jpg

There you see files created and edited by about seven different apps. For the most part, I don’t need the apps to see or access the files belonging to another app. I put all these files from different apps into the same directory, however, for organizational purposes. Everything I collect or create or edit for this project is kept together.

On iOS, data is generally organized by app. At a basic level, this is good. Plus it avoids the complications of a traditional file system which is both hard for many people to understand and which may not serve most people as much as the complication it brings. On the iPhone especially, this “each app manages its own docs” tends to work well for me. On the iPad, though, I really miss the ability to organize everything for a project in one place.

You might be able to workaround this a bit by using an app like GoodReader or FileBrowser. (There are a bunch more too.) These apps essentially work like a file system. The problem, though, is that the interaction between this file system and other apps is limited.

Apple could provide a system-wide file system and a Finder app. Lots of people have been calling for that, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Maybe there could a project organizer app. Other apps could let it know what documents they have. The projects app would then let the user arrange these into projects. Then, tapping a document name/icon in a project would launch the document’s app and load the document. The actual data remains managed by the originating app. The projects app just provides a way to bring together and organize links to documents inside multiple apps.

Another benefit of the iPad retina display

When I remotely connect to my iMac at home, I’ve been switching the display down to the resolution of the (old) iPad: 1024 by 768 pixels. That way, I don’t have to shrink the image or scroll around.

The resolution of the retina display on the new iPad (2048 by 1536) is more than the native resolution of my iMac (1680 by 1080), though. So, the iPad can display every pixel from my iMac in its native resolution and have some left over for the controls of the app I use to connect to the iMac.

If I were to upgrade to a current 27-inch iMac (2560 by 1440), however, the iPad would be a little short again.

The future of the Mac

The iOS-ification Of Apple’s Ecosystem

It does indeed look like the Mac is going to start looking more and more like iOS. Honestly, that makes me uncomfortable.

A key to the success of the iPhone and iPad is that they didn’t try to shoehorn desktop/laptop software onto the palmtop/tablet. I think the same logic holds that what is good for the palmtop/tablet isn’t necessarily good for the desktop/laptop.

(If I had my druthers, the iPad would be called a laptop and MacBooks would be called mobile desktops.)

Apple does recognize this. They’ve said that their research showed touch-screens don’t work well for desktop/laptop systems. But, still, they seem to be carrying “back to the Mac” farther than I’m comfortable with.

But that’s OK.

The reason I don’t have a Linux or *BSD system in the house anymore is simply that the Macs can do pretty much everything Linux can do. Perhaps as the Mac becomes more like iOS, I’ll have a reason to bring Linux back into the house.

It may even be that someday I won’t even have a Mac. The iPad and the Linux box will split everything that I used to use my Mac for.

MacBook versus MacBook Air

Comparing the $999 MacBook to the $999 MacBook Air:

MacBook advantages:

• Faster processor (+1 gigahertz)
• More storage (+186 gigabytes)
• Larger display (+2 inches)
• Has an optical (CD/DVD) drive

MacBook disadvantages:

• Lower resolution display (-25 kilopixels)
• Heavier (+1.7 pounds)
• Bigger

Comparing specs certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. If I were going to buy a laptop, though, I still think I’d go with the MacBook rather than the Air.

Is Apple prepping a new programming language?

waffle → Surpass:

It is my belief that Apple is definitely working on a new language to surpass Objective-C as their intended, primary, publicly recommended programming language...

I’ve been thinking that it seems very strange that Apple’s primary language is (still) Smalltalk grafted onto C.

If he’s right, I hope that, like the A4 processor (which is ARM based) and Safari (which is HTML, CSS, and Javascript based), it isn’t a wholly new language.

Would Smalltalk be a hard sell to developers who have accepted Objective-C?

iMac apps vs. iPad apps

In a comment to I’ve Changed My Mind About The iPad, Joeflambe wrote:

yuck, an iPad, really?

not a real computer since there are no real apps that you use daily on your current computer.

This seems like an interesting exercise. Let’s look at the most used apps on my iMac and whether there is an iPad equivalent.

• Safari: Check

I have a Flash blocker installed on my iMac, so lack of Flash on the iPad isn’t much of a change for me.

• Mail: Check
• iChat: Check (AIM)
• iCal: Check
• Address Book: Check
• iTunes: Check
• iPhoto: Check
• GarageBand: Check (StudioTrack)
• Evernote: Check

Now, to be fair, the iPad equivalents of the above do not always have all the features of their Mac counterparts. The main functionality is there. The rest...well, the iPad isn’t even a year old yet.

• Preview (as PDF reader): Check

The iPad has PDF reading built in, but no specific app for it. I do most of my PDF reading/referencing in GoodReader.

• iWork: Check

Some people will say matter-of-factly that nobody is going to want to write a term paper or create a spreadsheet on an iPad. shrug

OK, Pages for iPad doesn’t have footnotes...yet. It can’t print directly from the iPad—though Jobs himself has allegedly acknowledged that printing is in the works. (Yes, I’ve seen the photocopier pic. I LOL’d...the first time.) With my Bluetooth keyboard, I can’t see why I wouldn’t write a lengthy document with Pages for iPad. Even if I currently have to move it to my iMac for the finishing touches.

The whole keyboard + iPad topic is fodder for its own post.

I’ve created a few spreadsheets on the iPad. No less complex than those I would have created on my iMac. Although, I’m not that much of a spreadsheet user.

The iPad actually seems like a fine platform for creating presentations. We’ll see how it goes when I next need to create one.

• GuitarPro: Strike

I recently bought this Mac app. In fact, I bought it—in part—to produce content for the excellent TabToolkit iPad/iPhone app. (The fact that I can’t use it for that at the moment could be another post.) This is another app—like Keynote—that might actually work as well, if not better, on the iPad.

• DrScheme: Strike

Unfortunately, Apple’s rules don’t allow for an equivalent to DrScheme.

What if? Well, if it were a fairly straight port, it probably wouldn’t work very well without a keyboard. (Which is OK; I have one.) I can imagine a visual/touch interface for editing Scheme source code, though. (I’m imagining something like what I imagine the Viaweb editor was like.)

I think you could do a “DrEcmaScript” within Apple’s rules, though. As either an app (if it used WebKit) or a web app. I suppose a Scheme interpreter written in Javascript would be allowed, though perhaps not practical.

So...only two strikes.

It might be interesting to look through my iPad apps and see which ones don’t have Mac equivalents...or those for which I wouldn’t want a Mac equivalent.

Is the iPad going to replace my iMac? No, I don’t think so. Not anytime soon. It can, I think, come astonishingly close, however. There is a lot of overlap between the Mac, iPad, and iPhone; but there’s also enough outside those overlaps to justify each. The overlaps mean more flexibility.

The iPad may not replace my iMac, but imagine an iPhone OS desktop device. That might. Of course, being a programmer, I might still want a Linux/FreeBSD system for tinkering. (One of the nice things—for me—about Mac OS X is that I can get to the BSD personality underneath it when I want to.) For getting things done, however, I’m happy to use “app consoles”.

Do you really need Flash for the Web?

Do you really need Flash for the Web?
Originally uploaded by Kendall Helmstetter Gelner

Actual screen shots from an iPhone of the sites Lee Brimelow used in his “oh noes...the Internet on iPad won’t work at all without Flash” mock-ups. It turns out that six of the ten serve up Flashless versions of themselves to the iPhone.

On the iPad/Flash brouhaha

In a comment to this Smarterware blog post, Mark Williamson asks:

I am so torn, do I support 94% of my customers? Or do I let the 6% with either a choice that they made to not have flash or a choice that was made for them by their device supplier dictate how my site might work?

What you do is simply this: You make sites that degrade gracefully. That means you don’t use Flash (or any other such technology) for stuff you don’t need to use it for.

For example, I ordered pizza from Domino’s online recently with Flash disabled. I didn’t get to see the fancy preview image of my pizza with the toppings composited onto it because it required Flash. The actual functionality of the site—ordering food—worked perfectly fine without Flash.

John Nack writes:

And today, more than 15 years after Netscape debuted, Flash remains the only way to, say, display a vector chart across browsers (i.e., such that you can count on every viewer seeing it).

Except that you can’t count on every viewer seeing it. See the Smarterware post above. Those figures don’t even count most iPhone and iPod Touch traffic. That is why nearly every feature that has been added to the web over the years provides for providing alternate content for browsers that don’t support that feature.

It also doesn’t count the visually disabled who can’t see the chart even if they have Flash installed. This is why the standards today provide ways to provide text descriptions of visual elements.

If you use Flash to show a vector chart without providing a raster alternative and a text description, some “viewers” aren’t going to be able to “see” it.

Apple doesn’t support Flash on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and won’t support it on the iPad. This is not about Flash vs. HTML5. This is not about Apple vs. Adobe.

Apple is not supporting any browser plug-ins on the iPhone OS devices. Why? Because browser plug-ins are the biggest source of Mac OS X crashes.

If you follow the advice of Lee Brimelow, as he wrote in the comments to his “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” post...

If you can do something in HTML then we recommend people to do that. Use Flash when you need richer interactivity. It’s not HTML OR Flash. They can coexist.

...then the iPad not having Flash won’t be a problem. Flash is for the butter, not the bread.

So, is Apple lying when it claims the iPad is “the ultimate browsing experience”?

sigh

Where to even start? The fact that this is opinion? (It’s not hard to find someone who feels that browsing without Flash is better than browsing with it, by the way.) The fact that it is marketing?

The iPad does fill a gap.

When you bought a laptop, I said, “That’s not what I want.”

(You know who “you” are. Not everyone reading this will be “you”.)

When you bought a “smart phone”, I said, “That’s not what I want.”

When the iPhone and iPod touch came out, I said, “Close”, and I bought one. I said, “I’d like a tablet-sized one.”

When the MacBook Air was rumored, I thought, “Maybe”. When it came out, I said, “That’s not what I want.”

When the iPad was announced, you said, “That’s not what I want.”

I said, “Finally!” (Perhaps)

(There’s lots of other things that could be mentioned: Newton, Palm (I wanted a tablet version), the worthless tablet PC I bought that ran Microsoft Windows, &c.)

Scoring the iPad without having used it

In iPad About, Stephen Fry writes:

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device.

It’s not about the extra features. It’s about doing the basic features right. It isn’t about what it does; it is about how it does it. It isn’t about the number of features; it’s about the user experience.

Yes, you can browse the web and do e-mail on a laptop, a “smart phone”, or a netbook. Yes, the iPad doesn’t have other features that those devices have. What Apple is claiming is that the iPad handles these basic features—like the web and e-mail—better than those other devices.

Here are the tasks Apple touted as what the iPad needs to do better than a “smart phone” or a laptop. I’m guessing at how well it will do in each category.

By the by, I’m not a laptop person. I’ve used laptops, so I can do some comparison, but—for me—the comparison against my iMac tends to stand in for the laptop.

Web browsing: I’ve surfed the web on desktop computers, laptops, “smart phones”, and on my TV. There is a time and a place for using the web from all those devices. Most of the time, however, I’d prefer to be doing it the way it looks in the iPad demo.

E-mail: Pretty much the same story as web browsing. (Except I don’t think I’ve ever done e-mail on my TV.) I still want to access my e-mail from my iPhone and my iMac, but I expect the iPad will become my preferred e-mail access.

Viewing and sharing photos: Yes. Hands down. The iPhone will still be preferable for taking photos simply because it can and the iPad can’t. The iMac will still be preferable for organizing and sharing online. Still, viewing and sharing in person is an important thing that the iPad does look better suited for.

Video: Having watched movies on both a laptop and my iPhone (and my iMac), I think the iPad will be preferable. Of course, I expect my HDTV will still be preferable to the iPad, but perhaps not my standard-definition TV.

Music: I don’t see how the iPad adds significantly to this. Better browsing but that isn’t much. My iPhone will still be my preference.

Games: It depends on the game. Some games are going to be better on my iPhone; some on my iMac; some on the iPad.

E-books: It depends. For some books—like most fiction—I think I’ll still prefer my iPhone. For other books—like PDF RPG manuals—I think I’ll prefer the iPad.