The Musings & Ramblings of Mark Lilback
mark
Mark is one of the founders of Agile Monks, where he is CTO and the lead Software Architect. He started programming on an Apple II+ in 1981 at the age of 9.
Homepage: http://www.lilback.com/
AIM: mlilback
Posts by mark
Safari vs. Chrome as default browser
Jan 16th
I’ve noticed more and more of the bloggers I read prefer Chrome over Safari (the two I remember off the top of my head are MG Siegler and Justin Williams.) So last month I decided to give it a try.
In general, I like Chrome better. However, I switched back to Safari after a few weeks because of one problem: bookmark syncing. With Safari’s use of iCloud, I can add a bookmark at home, work, on my laptop, on my iPad, or on my iPhone and it shows up on all of them. Chrome can’t do this.
I’ve never taken well to multitasking on the same computer, mainly because I hate having to switch my app windows around. It was great with Snow Leopard since I would make a space for each task I was working on. But with the “upgrade” of spaces in Lion, that no longer works for me. Since the spaces no longer stay in the same order when I use the keyboard to navigate them, that workflow broke for me.
My solution has been to multitask with multiple devices. When I’m at my desk, I’ll always have an iPad open so I can refer to a book, website, or wikipedia article. When I’m working in bed, I’ll have two iPads and possibly my laptop. In that situation, bookmark syncing is critical.
Other than that, I have a number of smaller problems with Chrome:
- History Menu: chrome’s is 100% useless. My bookmark bar has the most visited sites (duhh, who would frequently visit a site and not bookmark it?). Recently closed isn’t that useful, either. Safari gives you date-organized menus with days worth of history. Awesome.
- Bookmark Menu: Why the hell do I want the menu to contain the exact same bookmarks visible in the bookmark bar? Why are my other bookmarks hidden away at the bottom of the bookmark menu. Chrome has thrown over 10 years of muscle memory out the window for no good reason.
- I hate the title bar. I feel like there isn’t enough space in the Safari one, and I personally hate any window without a proper title bar. I hate when things don’t follow the HIG. Hell, I still don’t understand why anyone would want to theme any program or even use a desktop picture. I want 100% consistent UI in every program (fullscreen games being the only exception.
- Autostart of videos in background tabs. If there are multiple links on a page I want to follow or I just want to look at one of them later, I open them in new tabs. With YouTube search results I might open 10 tabs I want to look at. And Chrome will start playing them all as fast as possible. Stimpy, you idiot!!
Yes, there are plenty of bad things about Safari and good things about Chrome. I particularly like Chrome’s tabs much better. But without addressing bookmark syncing, Chrome has no chance of being my default browser. And yes, I’ve looked at Xmarks. But it requires an installer and I refuse to run it. If a add-on/extension works in Chrome and Firefox, it should work in Safari.
I don’t even require full-sync like Safari does with iCloud. As long as Chrome can sync with the desktop Safari bookmarks, Safari will take care of iCloud. Hell, at a minimum, let me reimport bookmarks skipping duplicates. Or let me export my chrome bookmarks to Safari’s (i.e. Other Bookmarks -> Bookmark Menu).
Chrome, you tempt me. But I gotta stick with Safari.
Sure, wipe out my bookmarks. Thanks, Apple.
Oct 13th
Earlier today Xcode downloaded a documentation update for Lion. I didn’t think anything of it, until I needed to look up something. All of a sudden, none of my bookmarks in Xcode work!
I know Xcode bookmarks really suck. I have to remember Mac OX bookmarks are above iOS bookmarks since you can’t rename them. Theoretically I could have four links to “Foundation Framework Reference” and have no way to distinguish which is which. But I still make use of them. But in my mind, blowing away a crapload of bookmarks like this must mean that no one at Apple uses them. Which in my mind, just confirms how bad they suck.
Automatic updates are nice, but not when they blow away your data and screw up your workflow.
Some of us remember 9/11 everyday
Sep 11th
I purposely avoided ground zero this weekend. I would have liked to visit on my first trip back to NYC in almost six years, but it will always be a deeply personal affair for me, one I can’t share with the callous, sensationalistic press and disgusting politicians faking tears for votes.
As I’ve passed newsstands with full page pictures of the burning towers, as I’ve heard younger passengers on the bus I’m on say that 9/11 doesn’t mean anything specific to them, I can’t help but get upset. Not at the youth. Vietnam never meant anything to me, and I don’t expect 9/11 to mean much to them. But at the media, the politicians, the greedy trying to make a profit.
Imagine having lost a loved one on that fateful day. Then think about walking buy a newsstand covered with tabloid headlines next to pictures from that day. I guess I was fortunate to only lose friends and neighbors. I can’t imagine what it would feel like if I’d lost a wife or child.
If you want to remember 9/11, how about remembering the still ongoing war in Afghanistan that has cost so much that if we’d forgone it we could have easily provided universal healthcare, better education for our children, and not had such a massive debt.
Or think about the massive government intrusions we’ve allowed in our lives in the name of safety. I caused a stir in high school with an editorial titled “Big Brother is Watching”. I feel so neive to have gotten upset over cameras in the parking lot when today we let government employees grope infants and senior citizens.
I wish the press would spend 1/100 of the time the spend on 9/11 this weekend on the corruption and greed that has feed of the fears raised that day. But for those of us who were there, for those of us who lost loved ones, for those of us who still have nightmares about watching people jump 90 floors to their death instead of burning to death, please stop with the flag waving and the pictures. The pictures in my mind are more than enough.
OmniGraffle Line Endiings
Mar 24th
I was wondering what some of the line endings in OmniGraffle were called, but I couldn’t find them documented anywhere in the Manual or even via a Google search. So I made up this list using OmniGraffle.
Click on the image to view it full sized. The image is public domain, so feel free to do whatever you like with it.
I love the reliability of Unix
Mar 9th
I love how reliable and depenedable Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings are. I was wondering when I last rebooted (I try to reboot every week or so) and got the following:
mlilback@pebbles$uptime 1:05 up 29 days, 14:49, 2 users, load averages: 0.54 0.72 0.70
And the only reason I rebooted 29 days ago was a system update that required a restart. And this is on my MacBook Pro. How many windoze laptops out there run that long without a reboot?
And I can never go back to a conventional hard drive again. I’ve got a 260 GB SSD drive and things are so freaking fast. At work I just got a 4-core iMac with a SSD and it is even faster. I can compile pretty much anything in under 5 minutes, even MacSQL which used to take 30 minutes for a clean build.
