sharpreader - a windows RSS feed reader. Uses .NET, which is all the rage nowadays, apparently.

It’s beautiful, easily the best RSS reader I’ve ever seen, and that includes the one I wrote :-). Proper OPML export / import (It’s amazing how meny readers get this wrong), the interface, although slightly hard to figure out makes a lot of sense once you get the hang of it, and frankly usability and learning curves can go hang once I can use the thing.

The nicest feature, though, is the threading. I’ll notice which other blogs you read have linked to this one, and will do the litte ‘+’ symbol thing so you can expand them and see all the interlinks. It’s niiiiiiiice. I’m suddenly tempted to go back to “lectern”:/programming/lectern and hack this in somehow, though it’ll be hard. Maybe I’ll write a mac one and steal the niche of NNW. Maybe I’ll write a bad alpha and get distracted by some other project. Yes, that seems to be the best idea.

Software interfaces evolve like this, it’s wonderful to watch. Web browsers are another fairly immature tech that grow “tabs” and other interface things, and that’s nice to watch too, even if they’re stupid. Genuinely new types of apps are rare, I can’t think of many off the top of my head, although obviously once they’re pointed out, it’s obvious…

I’m releasing another Bot::BasicBot at the moment, to change the semantics of the tick() method. Instead of getting called every 5 seconds, you now need to return a value from the tick() method, and you will be called again in that many seconds. this is waaay more useful than before, but of course it’ll break anything that uses it. Oops. But 0.2 has only been out a short time, so I should get away with it.

More of a problem is what to do with Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable, because I now can’t just pass the tick method straight through. I have a new version in CVS that I’m very happy with, needs more tests, though, but the feature still stopping release is per-module tick events. I want every module to be able to have independant tick events, instead of sharing one global tick, but haven’t come up with an elegant way of doing it yet..

Well, in the end, rather than fold my code into CGI::Wiki and its example scripts, Kake has persuaded me to release the thing as an actual module. So, the world now has CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Kwiki and CGI::Wiki::Kwiki. I’m not sure about the name of the latter, but given that is was mostly written as a Kwiki importer and front end, it made the most sense. I hope that people also realise that it doesn’t have to have anything to do with Kwikis at all, and can be used as a stand-alone wiki front end..

They still have very small version numbers, the formatter needs code, tables and comments, and the Wiki front-end needs tests (bad me), but as far as I can tell, for the most part they both work. The code is much cleaned up from the “last release”:/blog/programming/CGI-Wiki, all modular and everything, I’m much happier with it now.

You can get them both from CPAN.

Hah, finally I bullied simon into releasing Bot::BasicBot 0.04, allowing me to release a version of Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable that actually installs and builds and works. Thanks, Simon. I’ve bumped the version number to keep in sync with BasicBot, not totally sure why, as I suspect I’ll rapidly overtake it, but I’d like to get >10E-1 at some point…

Anyway, read the docs, or download the code, send me feedback.

Ah ha! I have a blogroll. Ph33r me.

In other news, Template::Plugin::XML::Simple is really nifty.

<p class="code">
[% USE blogroll = XML.Simple('/export/home/tomi/web/jerakeen.org/blogroll.opml') %] 
&lt;p class=header&gt;blogroll&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
[% FOREACH section = blogroll.body.outline %]
  &lt;a href="[% section.htmlUrl %]"&gt;[% section.text %]&lt;/a&gt;
  [% UNLESS loop.last %]&lt;br /&gt;[% END %]
[% END %]
&lt;/p&gt;

There was a throw-away comment by Dan Hill in an article on Elite about the desktop metaphor and the workarounds we have to use to make it work. Now, I don’t think exposé is a work-around. I think it’s the most sophisticated window-management system I’ve ever used, it’s lovely. But it does hilight something that’s need nagging at me for a while. The Desktop.

Now, essentially, the desktop metaphor is broken. It’s not a desktop at all. It’s far too small, for a start, I’ve heard it described as the airplane seat metaphor. But the most important distinction is what’s underneath all your bits of paper. Suppose you have a real desk. Pick up all the things on it and look underneath them. What do you see? You’ve got a completely blank desk. Ok, now hide all your windows and things from your computer ‘desktop’. Got a blank desk? No? Didn’t think so.

Eventually, everyone needs a hack in their windowing system so that they can get at the desktop. Windows has ‘Minimize All’, or in extreme cases, ‘Show desktop’ (there’s a difference between these two. Try explaining the difference to a non-geek). For me, Windows always seems neatest with all windows either maximized or minimized. The fact that the only graphical way of getting at your hard disk is the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop means that you need to be able to get at it easily. Mac OS X 10.2 and before never had a really good solution to get at the desktop. There are various third party hacks but the only decent way I ever used was to Command-Option-Click on the desktop, or Command-Option-H with the Finder focussed. This hides everything except Finder windows. Of course, if there are Finder windows blocking your desktop, you’re stuffed. Ah, well.

Exposé solves this - one button and all your windows get out the way. Yay! Finally they’ve solved a problem Windows solved 5 years ago. (Or whenever, I don’t care).

I’m tired of working round this. I can shuffle through all of my windows with Command-Tab, but I can’t get to the desktop without moving all the windows out the way? This is an annoying special case, and I don’t like it.

New philosophy. Nothing will go on the desktop. Nothing at all. I won’t display drives on it, I won’t save files on it. I’m going to change it’s permissions so that I can’t write to it. My default download folder will be a folder in my home directory. We’ll see how long I last before I go insane.

Update - I follow this up here

The Mac OS X Finder has an interesting toolbar. blech will happily rant about it for hours, and I agree with him, toolbars do not belong on Finder windows. Or at least, not in the icon view Finder windows, and neither of us like the Browse view at all. But that’s missing the point. I’m convinced the toolbar on Finder windows is a vestigal shelf, although I can’t find anything on the web that backs this up, and I’ve never used NeXTStep, where the shelf was originally seen. You can drag things onto it from finder windows, and they’ll stay there and you can run / open them by clicking on them.

The way it fails in this is that you can’t drag files off the toolbar into another folder and move the original - dragging things off removes them from the toolbar. Arguably better from a least-surprise point of view, but it removes one of the nicest things about the shelf, it’s use as a scratch area. Oooh, thought, this is exactly how the right hand side of the dock behaves, except you can’t drag apps onto the right hand side of the dock.

Oh, and there aren’t any tooltips, so if you have ‘icons only’ toolbars, you can’t tell where things point. That’s annoying.

Programming languages have grammar. There are languages like perl, where the grammar is composed almost entirely of random ‘$’ and ‘%’ symbols scattered throughout the code. And there’s languages like AppleScript, where the grammar is practically english, making it much nicer to read than perl. Hah, perl is often called a ‘write-only language’, it’s so incomprehensible.

But I loathe Applescript, and I think perl is luuurvely. And it’s for this exact rule. I can use computers. I’m a geek. And I’m prepared to learn a new grammar. That’s fine, and it’s a specialist grammar, and programming is like that, I’ve learnt a heap of these things. But english-like programming languages are confusing. I can speak english. I know how it works. In english, you can rearrange words and have the sentence still make sense. Try doing that in Applescript. Grammars that look like english, but aren’t actually english, annoy the hell out of me.

I’m a mac user. I have a blog. Union law therefore requires me to mention Konfabulator. It lets you put ‘widgets’ on your desktop - little image / XML / javascript components that do stuff like calendars and clocks and cuteness.

It’s all too unbearable for words. I used it for almost 4 hours before it drove me crazy. I have tools that do all this stuff. The default widgets are just not compelling. The one thing that would make it bearable would be if I (a) the widgets were on a layer behind the desktop icons, and not fully-fledged windows, so they don’t keep popping to the foreground on top of my other windows, and (b) if I could lock the layout so I can’t click on them and they won’t take the focus. But then they just become ‘further for macos’. Which would be a good thing, actually.

Oh, and the widgets aren’t configurable. Hell, resizable would do, I really need a frikking battery meter taking up half my visible screen area. And yeah, all the default colour choices are fine, I don’t need to change the colod of the stock ticker (stock ticker? Why do these things always have a stock ticker?) so it’s not INCREDIBLY UGLY. Sigh.

2lmc weigh in

there aren’t any fast computers. Some computers are faster than other computers, but owning a faster computer merely lets you run a more advanced operating system and suite of software, and slows down the actual speed of the computer till it’s the same as always. There’s always the thought ‘I could run, say, Windows 3 on this machine and it would fly‘, and you could, but there’s a reason no-one uses Windows 3 any more, and it’s Trumpet winsock (oh, the memories).

every new version of windows (I’m using windows as an example for the moment, but don’t get hung up on it, we can and will apply this to other things) has features the last one didn’t. I could be mostly happy with windows 2000, say. But Windows XP does this really nifty thing when you put a blank CDs in, it’ll open an explorer window and you can drag files into it and burn them to CD, so you don’t have to mess with awful 3rd party crap. Or when you plug a digital camera in it’ll do the right thing, and again you don’t have to mess with nasty 3rd party camera drivers. (yeah, yeah, stifling innovation, waffle waffle waffle. Have you ever used the obscenity Canon try to foist off on you as an interface?)

So on a decent machine with a CD burner that will take it, I’ll install Windows XP. And so the more powerful machine will be slowed down by the overhead of trying to look like a huge boiled sweet. I’ll live with this, because I get other benefits. But it’s annoying.

It’s not just Windows. Gnome 2, say, is slower than Gnome 1. But it’s much nicer. Mac OS X is a bit slower than Mac OS 9 (a bit slower. Just a little bit). I have a mac laptop now that’s 3 times the speed of the last laptop I had. It’s about the same speed to use. Certain things have changed - I can scroll web pages now and not have to worry about redraw speed, which is nice, but the slowness has moved into other things. App-switching can be sluggish sometimes. Performing certain functions in apps can be slow. But it’s so nice, and I’m sure not running linux on this thing, not after the pure slickness that is OS X, it would be unbearable. So my machine is the same speed as the last one.

(Anyone saying I need more memory is missing the point. There’s >300 megs in here, linux would fly… I know MacOS wants memory, that’s my point)

Dave Hyatt, the insane fool who is the public face of Safari, has actually asked for comments about the UI of Safari. So naturally every single comment and trackback mentions tabbed browsing. Hell, there’s even a comment saying roughly ‘I’ve never used tabbed browsing, but lots of people clearly like it, so they should put it in’. I consider this another good reason to kill all humans.

My house as a whole isn’t a big fan of tabbed browsing. blech will grouch on about them for hours. hitherto has actually ranted in a public place about them. But given the massive number of pro-tab advocates out there, I find myself needing to stick an oar in and splash as many people as possible as well, just to keep things even. And not only that, but I have the opportunity to trackback to someone who’s invited it. Oh, the excitement.

So. Tabbed browsing. it’s been around a while, I personally first remember it in Opera, but my first serious exposure to it was in Galeon, under Gnome 1. And verily, it was Good. I could put my browser on one virtual desktop, set all links to open in tabs, and then click links merrily from other apps. When I was done, I’d go back to the desktop that held my web browser, and gosh, look, there’s a big heap of links here! Shiny! When I switched to Phoenix (or whatever it’s called nowadays) under Gnome 2, I used in exactly the same way. And it was still good. And faster than galeon, even.

But that’s all missing the point. I was forced to use tabs there because the window-switching system is totally brain-dead under Gnome. I typically have 20+ browser windows open. Hell, I can have 40 if I get distracted. (aside: I loved galeon for this - the crash recovery was second to none. I’m afraid to open that many windows under any other operating system because if the browser dies, I lose them all.)

The problems with window-based browsing:

• Opening links pops a window to the top of the stack. I hope Alt-Tab works properly, because it’s a pain finding what you were just doing otherwise.
• If I’m using a taskbar, all the window buttons get tiny. I can’t pick the browser I want. I can’t pick any other app either, for that matter. All the buttons say ‘Docu…’ - really handy, that.
• If I’m using some sort of window list, all my non-browser windows are hidden in the huuuge list of browsers. Oh, and the 10 windows called ‘Terminal’, that was great too.
• I’m not even going to describe what the Alt-Tab list looked like. Ok, I am. 40 ‘web’ icons. Brilliant.

I’m now on a different platform. I use a mac. And the mac has per-application switching. So my Command-Tab list is manageable, I can switch between a relatively small number of running apps using the dock. And once I’m using the app, I can have a window list of all the windows belonging to that application. So I know I want a terminal, so I switch to the terminal app, and then I can flick through the terminals I have open until I find the right one. I can switch to the web browser, and easily get a list of open web browser windows. In fact, I can click and hold on the web browser icon, and jump straight to a required web browser with one (long) click. Handy.

Essentially, the task/window switching on the mac isn’t like windows. It’s very different, much more than appears superficially. Under windows, and under linux, tabbed browsing seems to work, giving you the same ‘switch to app, then decide what window I want’ behavior. It’s a different interface on the whole MDI nightmare that windows suffered from for so long. Under linux… hell, linux is a world to itself, as per usual, and I’m not going to judge it. But the mac has a way of dealing with this problem. It’s always had a way of dealing with this problem. People need to stop coming up with other ways to solve it, ways that aren’t as good.

Oh. And an actual feature I would like? It would be nice to be able to click on an RSS feed from a site, and have NetNewsWire subscribe to it. So I need the ability to set programs to be run for specific MIME-types. That would be nice.

“

Oh yes, micropayments. Our saviour. Everyone’s got a stack of internet business plans that’ll turn into liquid gold the very second the micropayment infrastructure arrives. I know I do. So where is it?

”

Lee Maguire

So I wanted to see which of my NNW () subscriptions were dead. And I wanted to get the hang of AppleScript. Right.

set errorlog to ""

tell application "NetNewsWire"
  repeat with check in subscriptions
    set err to error string of check as string
    if length of err > 1 then
      set errorlog to errorlog & “Error for ‘” & ((display name of check) as string) & “’ (” & (RSS URL of check as string) & “): ‘” & ((error string of check) as string) & “’\r”
    end if
  end repeat
end tell

tell application “BBEdit”
  make new text window with properties {contents:errorlog}
end tell

Pretty nifty. Course, you have to have BBEdit. But making it use TextEdit shouldn’t be hard.

Things that have pleased or annoyed me over the last few days. See my last entry for context.

Bad thing: I can’t use Screen Capture. Or whatever the Apple Command-Shift-[34] app is called. It writes files to the desktop by default, and I can’t seem to change this. With a non-writable desktop, I can’t take screen captures, and I’m reluctant to sacrifice the non-writable aspect. I could just let things write to it, and move them quick, but making the the thing ‘no access’ acts as a fail-safe. Screen captures aren’t worth losing that.

Good thing: It’s really, really pretty. I can also use quite cluttered-looking wallpapers that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to use, and they work well. I’ve found that the Mac OS ‘cycle through the pictures in this folder’ background works quite well, too. I never liked it before, because my icons look good in different areas of the screen depending on the wallpaper and where it’s ‘busy’, but with no icons, I can use anything. I feel so arty.

That’s it. On the whole, I’m very comfortable with a blank desktop. It’s changed my working style almost not at all.

Other notes

blech reminded me that Risc OS had a completely blank desktop, and treated it merely as a background and not somewhere you could put files. The linux equivalent, the ROX Desktop, almost does the same thing, you can place aliases to things on the desktop, which spoils it, but then I recall add-ons to Risc OS that let you do that, so I suppose it’s forgivable. Linux weenies are notoriously hard to break of their habits, which I think is a shame. Embrace change!

Comments on my previous entry mentioned that recent versions of Windows are becoming more sparse as it comes to desktops. ‘My Computer’ has vanished, as has ‘Network Neighbourhood’, in XP, and apparently 2003 Server takes things further. Longhorn… well, hah, PDC this weekend, we’ll see about Longhorn.

My problem with Windows in this respect is that just about every program under the sun feels that it needs its icon on your Start Menu and your Desktop. The particularly arrogant ones want a place on your Quick Launch Thingy as well. All time worst app award goes to Winzip, which by default puts itself on the top of your start menu, thus ranking itself with ‘Open Office Document’ in importance. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ve launched winzip as an app once in the last 5 years. I use the context menu, where it belongs. Why do I need it 2 clicks away at all times?

But I’m getting diverted from my point.

Oooh, windows 3 had a good desktop. It was totally un-special. Windows could minimise to it, but this works, because they were still windows, and therefore allowed to be on the desktop. They were just really small windows. Nothing else could touch the desktop. Windows 95 was weird for ages, all these spaces were things you could put files in..

Gnome 2 for a while had a nice option where you could use ~ as a desktop, flying in the face of all those osses that has decided that the desktop was a ‘special’ folder, but that treated it like it was your starting point for everything. I really liked ~ as a desktop, it encouraged you to keep things clean, and your desktop then really was the base of your GUI experience, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Alas, this option died, although I think it’s still buried in what passes for a registry in Gnome. Pity. Linux users again, I guess.

Enough. I’ll stop now. Comments - any other osses / windowing systems with nice desktops?

Update (4 years later!) - I’ve been informed of a hidden Finder option, this works as of 10.5.3:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 0

Prevents the Finder from managing the desktop window. Exactly what I oringinaly wanted - this means there’s still a ~/Desktop, and screenshots go there, but I don’t have any icons on my background. Lovely.