penguin sounds

John Gruber writes:

I totally believe Jobs’s story that it’s a complete re-write. The old iMovie was a good app, as a sort of stripped-down consumer-level Final Cut — but it still wasn’t any good for just putting clips together in a few minutes.

This makes very little sense to me. What about those of us who want to spend time working on their movies but who want to avoid Final Cut Pro/Express? Who expects to be able to do great things in just a couple of minutes?

When I make a movie, what I like to do is pick out a soundtrack, and then layout the clips in time with the music. I also like to adjust the volume curves to have different sounds fade in and out as appropriate. In the iMovie ’08 tutorials I’ve seen, you don’t get a timeline anymore. You get a box. You don’t get an audio waveform anymore. You get a shade of green in the box background.

I’m still going to buy iLife ’08, in the hopes that these features are still enabled somewhere. But I’m going to hide my iMovie ’06 application where it can’t be deleted in case it sucks.

The irony is that I was just telling a co-worker how iMovie is my favorite piece of software, of all time. The explorability of the software, with its undo-everywhere, was key. I still believe that unless you’re working with two video cameras, iMovie will serve most of your needs.

When I worked at an art school, I would teach students how to use iMovie, and I would always stress how important it was to experiment and that it didn’t matter if they made mistakes, because you could always undo. I’m sure undo is still a big part of the program. But getting rid of timelines seems too big a step away from traditional movie editing.

While the new iLife ’08 software looks really good feature-wise (I’m going to pick it up today), the really important thing to watch for is what style the interfaces have. They’re the only clue MacOS X developers have anymore to what our software should look like.

This might be the worst default dictionary I’ve ever seen.

sucks. The installation process for getting a build environment is the most painful series of steps I have ever taken in an install. You have to download the program. Then you download the SDKs. Then you have to edit the paths in the IDE. Then you have to open the project template files and comment out various obscure configurations if you want to have a workable setup.

Why are these many steps necessary? Thank god I’m already an engineer and could figure it out. For a Microsoft product, I’m really disappointed. Don’t they have a product manager for these things? Or do they just let anyone decide when to ship their software.

A little professionalism please, okay guys?

Guido van Rossum’s Python 3000 Status Update. Nothing new if you’ve watched his tech talk, but still an interesting read.

There was a bit of downtime at work while we waited for QA to verify our release. I took the oppertunity to get my workstation running lean and mean.

First thing was to find a good font. I’m pretty sick of Monaco. After looking at basically all of the available free programming fonts, I went with Deja Vu. It’s just like the BitStream Vera, but with more international characters. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the one true font.

The second thing to get was TmCodeBrowser, for browsing code in TextMate. TextMate’s built-in parser is a little weak. I’m sure there is a good reason why it doesn’t recognize a function declaration that’s been split up over multiple lines, but it’s a little surprising from a program that is insistent on the use of regular expressions.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
—Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs

I also grabbed Menu Meters, mostly as a way of checking if I had unknowingly written an infinite loop or memory leak.

Finally, I tweaked colormake to not highlight anything except errors and warnings and installed that too.

I finally signed up for a twitter account today after some prodding from my friend.

I gotta say, I’m not really feeling it. As a programmer, I really don’t want to see constant notifications distracting me and taking me out of the zone. And if I hide Twitterrific and set the update timer to 10 minutes, what’s the point?

Right now, the best use of Twitter is as a distributed notification framework, like Growl, but the notifications show up on your cellphone.

This would be an excellent feature for someone to add to Lingon.

After two years of work, Ardour has released version 2.0. I’ve been working with Paul Davis on and off for about six years now, and I am enormously happy.

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.

Based on stuffonfire’s zsh shout out, I’ll be switching to it on all my accounts and giving it a whirl. I’ve made it halfway through the user’s guide, but I might look for an actual book too.

I need to look up the syntax for bash every time I write a for loop, so I don’t have to worry about the difficulty of forgetting my old knowledge. I’ll post if I find anything interesting about it.