penguin sounds

If you are trying to register a callback on getting a URL passed to your program through AppleEvents, don’t use the documented kAEInternetSuite and kAEISGetURL enums. They are defined as ‘gurl’, but the actual value passed to your program is ‘GURL’. From what I can tell, everyone defines their own enums because this is well known.

Apple can’t fix it though, because it would break everyone’s software. So they keep documenting it as ‘gurl’, and we keep redefining it to the actual value.

Awesome.

I don’t want flash for the iPhone. People forget about how CPU heavy flash is. I don’t want a bunch of stupid punch the monkey ads running down my battery everytime I load a webpage. Many ads nowadays are Flash based and having all these tiny banner ad programs running in the background will be too much. The battery is already tottering on the edge of annoyingly frequent recharges.

Gruber’s first two Anthropomorphic Brushed Metal Interface articles were funny and how I started reading his site in the first place. (2005, 2006). But his latest gives me the creeps. I can only describe it as a bizarre snuff fantasy.

This is old news, in blog time, but Gruber’s response to Jalkut’s comment on the Leopard delay misses a couple points.

Gruber says:

That’s right in the middle of the most productive stretch in Mac OS X history – 10.0.0 was released in March 2001, 10.1.0 was released in September, and 10.2.0 was released less than a year after that in August 2002.

It only looks productive if you’re going by the numbering scheme. The features introduced in the increments from 10.0->10.1->10.2 were nowhere near as large as what was introduced in 10.3 and 10.4.

10.0 was unusable. That’s why 10.1 was given away for free six months after 10.0 was released. 10.2 came soon after because 10.1 still wasn’t very good.

If the release version numbers weren’t determined by marketing, 10.1 should have been 10.0.1 and 10.2 should have been 10.1.

As far as I can tell, 10.4 was the first release of OS X where it felt slower.